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THE GOSPEL FOR BOTH 
WORLDS 



TEN SERMONS PREACHED IN OUR FATHER'S 
HOUSE (MEMORIAL CHURCH) WORCESTER 



BY 

EDWARD EELLS 

AUTHOR OF " CHRISTMKE CHRISTIANITY, " 




BOSTON 

SHERMAN, FRENCH & COMPANY 

1911 



Copyright, 1911 
Sherman, French <3* Company J^ i o *\ 



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CI. A 25)37 U 9 



" What in me is dark 
Illumine, what is low raise and support ; 
That to the height of this great argument 
I may assert eternal Providence, 
And justify the ways of God to men." 

— Milton. 



CONTENTS 



CHAPTER PAGE 

I. The Only Gospel ... .1 

II. The Everlasting Gospel . . .11 

III. Our Unchanging Jehovah . . 28 

IV. The Same Jesus 40 

V. Knees That Will Bow . 52 

VI. The Gates Never Shut ... 64 

VII. The Sacredness of Hell ... 79 

VIII. First-Fruits of the Harvest . 95 

IX. The Great Commission . . .107 

X. The Completed Chorus . . . 121 



THE GOSPEL FOR BOTH 
WORLDS 



THE ONLY GOSPEL 

"Though we or an angel from heaven preach any other 
gospel unto you than that which we have preached unto 
you, let him be anathema. As we said before, so say I 
now again, If any man preach any other gospel unto you 
than that ye have received, let him be anathema." — Oala- 
tians i y 8 and 9. 

The gospel for both worlds ! It is no new in- 
vention: it offers no new terms of salvation; but 
it is the same dear gospel of salvation through 
the atoning blood and the redeeming grace of the 
Saviour who has died for me. There is no other 
availing gospel, as Paul declares in the previous 
verse. Peter also testifies, " Neither is there sal- 
vation in any other : for there is none other name 
under heaven given among men whereby ye 
must be saved." 

Nobody saves but Jesus. " Others may counsel, 
instruct, appeal, command; but only Jesus saves. 
On a Tyrolese pulpit a carved wooden arm holds 
out the cross. Nothing is worth the name of 
gospel preaching that doesn't do that. 

Outside of Christ, there is no availing gospel 
in morality, for morality cannot take away the 

1 



2 GOSPEL FOR BOTH WORLDS 

condemnation for past misdeed: there is no gos- 
pel in culture; for culture cannot regenerate the 
inclination of an evil heart: there is no gospel 
in social service unaccompanied with the spirit 
of Christ: there is no gospel in religious ob- 
servance ; for none can reconcile his own — much 
less another's — soul with God. 

" Could my zeal no respite know; 
Could my tears forever flow; 
These for sin could not atone: 
Thou must save, and Thou alone." 

It is such an old-fashioned sounding gospel, 
that we feel almost embarrassed by our singu- 
larity in standing for it. Everything else, al- 
most, is being preached to-day ; but nothing else 
is worth a rush to save a sinner's soul. It is 
the faith of our fathers: it is the everlasting 
gospel. As Theodore Cuyler suggests, it is 
built like the Eddystone lighthouse, upon the 
rock of ages. It has breasted the storms of 
centuries. It has guided millions safe into the 
port of heaven. Other lights have flickered for 
their hour here and there. Enthusiasts have 
lighted their beacons; wreckers have displayed 
their false signals; but when these go out in the 
night, the gospel of God's mercy through Christ 
shines on and saves. 

This is the true Light, which lighteth every 
man that cometh into the world. The publican 
who had never heard of Jesus, but cried, " God 



THE ONLY GOSPEL 3 

be merciful to me a sinner ! " the psalmist who 
foresaw little of God's plan of salvation, but 
prayed, " Have mercy upon me, O God, accord- 
ing to thy loving kindness : according unto the 
multitude of thy tender mercies blot out my 
transgressions " : these were justified and saved 
by the merits of the Christ who had not yet died 
for their sin. He who from darkest heathenism 
calls by any name — Jehovah, Allah, Vishnu — 
upon God for pardon and help to live anew is 
saved by the one Mediator between God and 
man — whom he will recognize and adore in 
Paradise. The man whose honest thinking has 
not yet brought him to the foot of the cross; 
but who believes in duty and kindness, and, even 
unconsciously, makes his life a prayer of righteous 
effort, this man will be saved by virtue of the 
grace of God in the indwelling Christ whom he 
does not yet fully understand. 

For a race of entirely correct people, such as 
we are not, there might be some message of good 
news in God's general benignancy worthy of 
being called in some weak way a gospel; but for 
sheer sinners like us, how can there be any good 
news, how can there be any gospel, how can there 
be any glad tidings, until our guilty, sin-loving 
souls come under the blood, the precious blood of 
Christ which cleanseth from all sin? 

" When wounded sore the stricken soul 
Lies helpless and unbound, 



4 GOSPEL FOR BOTH WORLDS 

One only hand, a pierced hand, 
Can salve the sinner's wound. 

When penitence has wept in vain 

Over some foul, dark spot; 
One only stream, a stream of blood, 

Can cleanse away the blot. 

Lift up Thy bleeding hand, O Lord; 

Unseal that cleansing flood; 
We have no solvent for our sin, 

But Thine own precious blood/' 

It may not be so much what we can do to 
please God; but what Christ does for us and 
in us and with us that saves us. A Scotch lad 
presented himself before the elders for admission 
to the church. They hesitated by reason of his 
youth, but reluctantly concluded to examine him, 
and began with the subject of regeneration. 

" Do you think, Sammy," said the pastor, " that 
you have been born again ? " " I think I have," 
was his answer. " Well, if so, whose work was 
that? " " Oh, God did a part, and I did a part." 
The elders around shook their heads. But the 
minister asked again, still kindly. " Ah, what 
part did you do, Sammy?" "Why, I opposed 
God all I could ; and He did the rest." 

Will you think me exceedingly narrow and re- 
actionary if I suggest that this is a religious 
experience, however oddly expressed, which may 
really be worth something? That is because it is 
founded upon something. 



THE ONLY GOSPEL 5 

Does it ever occur to us that we may be just 
a bit condescending toward the Almighty in our 
modern type of conversion? We make what we 
call a " decision for Christ " in some casual way. 
Perhaps we sign a card stating succinctly that 
we desire hereafter to ' lead a Christian life/ 
Then we join some church, and the incident is 
closed. 

Consciously or unconsciously, true conversion 
is perhaps nine-tenths passive. We turn, and 
become converted. We yield ourselves trem- 
blingly to God's mighty grace. " For by grace 
are ye saved through faith, and that not of your- 
selves ; it is the gift of God." 

Dear friends, what are we trusting in? Our 
own fickle, changeful choice of God? God pity 
us! is there any sure gospel or good news in 
that? We are but clinging to the edge of a 
granite cliff — by our numb finger-tips. But 
what are we trusting in? Our serene ability to 
follow the example of Jesus? We say we ad- 
mire and love his character (with a conscien- 
tiously small "h") and we intend to follow him 
whithersoever he goeth. Then, perhaps, next 
week, or the week after, we may be admiring and 
loving the example of Buddha, or of Swami 
Vivekananda, or Omar Khayyam, or Mrs. Eddy, 
and following that? Where is the gospel in all 
this? 

But what are we trusting in, anyway? Our 
moral advantages, our ethical culture? There 



6 GOSPEL FOR BOTH WORLDS 

have been found men with equally good begin- 
nings in the state penitentiary. 

These ropes of straw may seem for a time to 
meet the easy conditions of our easy terrestrial 
life: are we ready to trust in them for eternity? 
Do we crave no arms of a living God, no arms 
of a personal Saviour about us as we swing out 
over the abyss? How long will our soul's house 
of a fine-seeming, self-centered character 
stand when the winds of eternity blow, when its 
rains descend, when its floods come and beat 
upon it? Is it not founded upon the sand? But 
our sin! What will we do with that? The sin 
which perhaps we have forgotten: the sin we 
smile about to-day. Will just following the 
beautiful example of Jesus for an eternity wipe 
away that black score? Will it take the weight 
and the condemnation off our soul? Will it am- 
putate that importunate arm of the soul which 
creeps out and reaches after evil? Dear friends, 
there is only one gospel, and I am not ashamed 
to tell you this morning what I am trusting in. 
I am trusting in a God who is greater than my 
heart and knoweth all things; who when I con- 
fess my sin is faithful and just to forgive my 
sin and to cleanse me from all unrighteousness. 
He is faithful and just to do it; because His 
own dear Son, very God of very God, has borne 
my sin in His own body on the cross of Calvary. 
Believing on Him, we are saved for time and 
saved for eternity. We no longer need to think 



THE ONLY GOSPEL 7 

of hunting up something in our record that we 
may present it at heaven's gate. Jesus says 
" I am the way, the truth, and the life : no man 
cometh unto the Father but by me." 

Is anything else truly Christianity but this 
— unless it be by unconscious assimilation ? No 
religion is wider than ours in its genial influence, 
none narrower in its one essential. " Other 
foundation can no man lay than that is laid, which 
is Christ Jesus." 

"On Christ the solid rock I stand; 
All other ground is sinking sand." 

What else is there to stand surely upon in 
this world or the next? If then there is to be 
a gospel and a gospel message in both worlds, 
as, by the help of God's Spirit, I hope easily to 
prove in succeeding sermons of this series ; then 
it can only be the same gospel of life and mercy 
in Christ. No man can be saved in this world, 
and no man can be saved in the next world, by 
simply following the light of nature to the ex- 
tent of doing the best he knows how. That is 
simply because he doesn't, you know. Dante 
has inscribed over the gateway of his Inferno 
the sentence, " Ye knew your duty, and ye did it 
not." That takes us all in; except as this or 
that one is trusting in the only Saviour of sin- 
ners. No salvation for the heathen in this world 
or the next, no salvation for anyone except 



8 GOSPEL FOR BOTH WORLDS 

by knowing Christ, whom to know is life eter- 
nal. 

Does any man think he can sow his wild oats 
here, and perhaps reform in hell? Reform in 
Satan's inner kingdom, with the uplifting influ- 
ences slighted here withdrawn, with the society 
of the good and pure withdrawn, with the deadly 
delusion and fascination and delirium of sin a 
million fold strengthened upon his soul? Do 
we send our boys to Five Points or Leadville to 
reform? Standing upon hell's pavement made 
of earth's broken resolutions, will any man be 
inspired to make more and keep them? How 
long would it take him to climb from hell to 
heaven in the strength of his own dogged reso- 
lution, without a sigh of penitence, without a 
prayer for grace to overcome? The moralist's 
hell may be as hopeless as that of the renegade; 
if it is equally exclusive of the grace of God 
that bringeth salvation. 

On the other hand, that there is any essen- 
tial limitation in the gospel of Christ by reason 
of which it could not avail, God willing, to save 
penitents in hell as well as on earth, who will 
affirm? Christ tasted death for every man. He 
is able to save unto the uttermost all who come 
unto God through Him. If He can save men 
on the Bowery, or women on Bleeker St. ; He 
can save them in hell. 

An account by Mrs. Whittemore of the " Door 
of Hope " has for its frontispiece two portraits of 



THE ONLY GOSPEL 9 

the same face. The first is of a young woman 
as she came to them, a face prematurely haggard 
and weazened in vice and crime, shameless, hard, 
depraved in every line, wretched beyond belief 
and blear-eyed with debauchery. The com- 
panion picture is of the same face two years 
later — a modest, intelligent, spiritual woman, 
beautiful in her penitence, radiant in the joy 
of a soul made new. A greater transformation 
could hardly be conceived either here or in hell, 
and our Saviour is working these transformations 
day by day. 

Surely He would yearn to work them in 
eternity. He is the same yesterday, to-day and 
forever. By every instinct and impulse of His 
nature, He is eternally a saviour. He could not 
be content to suffer and die for small results. 
Predicting His death upon the cross, Jesus de- 
clared " And I, if I be lifted up from the earth, 
will draw all unto me." Thank God! He 
simply said, " ALL." Not only all men but all 
spirits of the universe, all demons of hell. Give 
Him time ; and see. 

On two recent occasions our thoughts have been 
turned to the text, " How shall we escape, if 
we neglect so great salvation? " To-day it 
comes to us with the possibility of a new mean- 
ing. So great salvation! so great salvation! 
We know not how great it may be. Probably 
it is greater than we have ever dreamed — 
longer, broader, deeper. If Christ's salvation 



10 GOSPEL FOR BOTH WORLDS 

were some small, partial, changeable thing; we 
might be excused for neglecting it, we might 
scorn to bother with it. But if it is held out 
steadily, consistently, yearningly through the 
ages ; of how much greater condemnation shall 
we be worthy for neglecting it! It may be a 
small matter to miss a trolley car; but a serious 
one to miss an ocean liner. So great salvation 
— the only, the infinite, the eternal. It is of- 
fered to you and to me to-day. We neglect it 
at our unspeakable peril. Now is the accepted 
time: now is the day of salvation. Turn ye, 
turn ye; for why will ye die? 



II 

THE EVERLASTING GOSPEL 

"And I saw another angel fly in the midst of heaven, 
having the everlasting gospel to preach unto them that 
dwell on the earth, and to every nation and kindred and 
tongue and people." — Revelation xiv, 6. 

In the Greek there is no article, either definite 
or indefinite, in our text, and the word ever- 
lasting — as everywhere else but in one passage 
of the New Testament — means simply seonian 
or " age-lasting." John writes, " I saw another 
angel flying in mid-heaven having seonian glad 
tidings." This gospel of our blessed Bible, 
which I tried to outline last Sabbath is indeed 
aeonian, age-lasting glad tidings. It is good 
news for the eternities. It is the everlasting 
gospel — 

First: In its efficiency for the everlast- 
ing SALVATION OF THE INDIVIDUAL SOUL* 

This is the c old time religion.' It is 999,000 
millionths of vital Christianity. It is the element 
of our sacred religion which perhaps we hear 
least about from the pulpits of to-day; yet it is 
infinitely the element of greatest power, of great- 
est consequence, or greatest meaning. Our 
fathers in the ministry stood in the pulpit and 
thundered forth eternity! eternity! eternity! 

11 



12 GOSPEL FOR BOTH WORLDS 

For us to do less is to betray by silence our lack 
of a strong conviction of the immortality of the 
human soul. If we believe that men are to live 
forever — this man and that man and every man 
— what else is there on God's earth to talk 
about, and pray over, and wrestle for but their 
eternal salvation? We glory in the influence 
of Christianity, for better conditions in this 
world, we exalt its high ideal of human brother- 
hood, we pray continually, " Thy kingdom come, 
Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven " ; 
yet take out of our religion its claim alone to 
provide a way of eternal salvation for immortal 
souls; and you do not leave in it power to per- 
manently lift men one half inch on earth. If 
there is no future life with its eternal choice for 
heaven or hell; why should I be fool enough to 
bother over questions of right or wrong, much 
less over anything that bears the name of reli- 
gion? Let me get the most out of my little 
insect life here, like any other animal. Let 
each live for self in the most enlightened way he 
can. Down with your Christlikeness, down 
with your high ideals: let us eat and drink, for 
to-morrow we die. 

Such audience as Christianity has in our 
modern world, it holds because it still has now 
and then, here and there, a word about eternity; 
because among the million busy thoughts of men 
one goes now and then, here and there, ques- 
tioningly, wonderingly out upon the future life. 



THE EVERLASTING GOSPEL 13 

For one soul and another Christ's gospel is still 
an everlasting gospel; it is profitable not only 
for the life which now is, but for that which is 
to come. It is a gospel for both worlds to our 
own individual souls. We believe in it; we love 
it; we are ready to lose all for it; because it 
extends our outlook beyond this little, meager 
life; because it lifts our life here to the dignity 
of a pilgrim's progress ; because it cures the 
homesickness of the soul; because it makes the 
humblest lot rich in hope, because it clears up 
every mystery of want and pain and sorrow with 
the confidence of a new beginning beyond. 

This hope we have as an anchor of the soul, 
both sure and steadfast, and that entereth into 
that within the veil. Jesus saves me, and He 
saves me for both worlds. He lifts me out of 
hell on earth, He saves me eternally from hell 
beyond, and makes every day of my little life 
here glad in the light of heaven. This is the 
Saviour I need, a Saviour for eternity, One 
who has already prepared a place for me in 
His Father's house of many mansions, One who 
is coming for me at the end of my earthly life 
to receive me unto Himself, that where He is 
there I may be also. Without Him I cannot 
live ; for without Him I dare not die. He is my 
only hope for time and for eternity. He that 
hath the Son hath life, and he that hath not 
the Son of God hath not life. With a living 
faith in the living Christ, it is a blessed thing 



14 GOSPEL FOR BOTH WORLDS 

to live, and a more blessed thing to die. We en- 
joy living as no one else can enjoy it; and what 
is a good deal more, we expeet to enjoy dying 
too — 

" Jesus can make the dying bed 
As soft as downy pillows are; 
While on His breast I lean my head, 

And breathe my life out sweetly there." 

Life! life! life! this is the thing we crave >. — » 
fuller, gladder, richer, sweeter, longer even to 
eternity: It is the infatuation of living that 
makes fools forget eternity, makes the wise re- 
member it. Jesus came that we might have life, 
that we might have it more abundantly here; 
simply because we have it consciously as a little 
beginning of life hereafter. 

" Thou of life the fountain art; 
Freely let me take of Thee: 
Spring Thou up within my heart, 
Rise to all eternity." 

I said that this gospel, eternal in its offer of 
eternal salvation for the individual soul, explains 
all the mysteries of life, makes up for its want, 
and pain, and sorrow. I spoke too fast. It 
might, if each of us lived and died only to himself. 
But we are bound in one bundle of life: a 
thousand cords unite us heart to heart: heaven 
itself cannot satisfy each for himself alone. The 
soul that has found Christ, and finding Christ, 



THE EVERLASTING GOSPEL 15 

has found heaven; is still unsatisfied until other 
related souls have found Christ and heaven too. 
Heaven will not be heaven to us without our 
loved ones. And as our hearts broaden in the 
love of Christ, a greater and greater number of 
people come within our sphere of those we could 
not bear eternally to miss from heaven. Think 
of all the people you know: how many of them 
could you quite contentedly and to all eternity ; 
if it were God's will ; miss from heaven ? Is there 
one? is there one? is there one? Then where 
is your Christlikeness ? The man who has 
wronged you most: the woman you have most 
cause to dislike — could you altogether enjoy 
heaven knowing that that one was writhing hope- 
lessly in hell? You might stand it a thousand 
years; but now you are starting on your second 
thousand, knowing that this too is only one 
breath of eternity: can you forget Mrs. Jones; 
can you get poor Mr. Brown out of your mind? 
There is one soul you know hopeless forever in 
hell. There is no grudge in your heart against 
it. Heaven wouldn't be heaven, if you could 
bear a grudge there. The sore spot he or she 
made in your heart has long been soothed in 
heaven's sea of love and rest. There is no 
refuge for you in indifference to that soul's 
fate. Could heaven be heaven to a soul indiffer- 
ent to the fate of one other soul? Suppose you 
saw your crudest enemy pinioned in a wrecked 
and burning railroad train: suppose that face 



16 GOSPEL FOR BOTH WORLDS 

writhing in its agony turned toward you? 
Could you bear to look, could you bear not to 
look without tearing at those burning timbers 
even with bare hands if only you could save? 
Jesus on the cross prayed, " Father forgive 
them, for they know not what they do : " what 
would the cry of your soul in heaven be to God 
for your worst enemy languishing in hell? 

And if for him; what for the fourteen hun- 
dred million neighbors of ours living on this 
planet to-day: what for all the equal numbers 
of generations gone before — each one your un- 
known brother, sister — with like sorrows, like 
joys — needing Christ just as you; yet knowing 
Him so little or never at all? What would your 
irrepressible cry to God be for each of these, 
until it was shown you that the last one was to 
be saved? 

Lives touch lives strangely in God's world. 
There is no dark problem for one life that sooner 
or later is not a problem for all. No life of 
all the million millions can be so glad with one 
life marred. It is glorious to be one of God's 
elect; but surely He whose name is love could 
not elect any soul to an eternal selfishness 
shrugging its shoulders contentedly on the brink 
of another's hell. Would the gospel of its own 
eternal salvation be altogether glad tidings of 
great joy, would it be an eternal, Ionian gospel, 
all-satisfying, everlasting, with now and then the 
faint echo of a groan coming from distant hell? 



THE EVERLASTING GOSPEL 17 

Thank God! the plain message of His whole 
Word, as we shall search for it here during the 
coming Sabbaths, does not leave us to contemplate 
such eternal despair. The gospel of Christ is 
truly an everlasting gospel not only in its effi- 
ciency for the everlasting salvation of the in- 
dividual soul; but — 

Second: It is everlasting in its offer 
of salvation to lost and perishing souls. 

John says, " I saw an angel flying in mid- 
heaven having aeonian glad tidings to proclaim 
unto them that dwell on the earth and unto every 
nation, and tribe, and tongue, and people." 
And so the angel proclaimed to the shepherds, 
"Behold, I bring you glad tidings of great joy 
which shall be to all the people." 

Let me say in the start that I sympathize earn- 
estly with those earnest minds to whom this 
broader, longer gospel brings a shock of fear 
and of incredulity. It seems almost too good 
to be true. The very relief of its waking 
causes a recoil back toward the old nightmare. 
The question rises very quickly: if then there is 
to be no limit to the offers of God's mercy in 
Christ Jesus ; if indeed, in this sense too it is an 
everlasting gospel, eternally to be extended as 
long as there are perishing souls ; how then can 
we hope to bring men to a repentance which 
may be postponed indefinitely without losing its 
final opportunity? 



18 GOSPEL FOR BOTH WORLDS 

There is no truth of God's word so plain or 
so sacred but some unstable ones have wrested 
it unto their own destruction. Let us, neverthe- 
less, look for truth gravely, fearlessly, and for 
the love of what is true. If this doctrine of 
aeonian salvation is true and there is both 
Scripture and reason to support it; then we 
need have no fear but that it will work good and 
not evil. A calculating timidity, it is not really 
the strongest element in man's nature. We can 
find better stuff than this in men to which we 
may appeal. There may be one thing worse 
than to lose the hold upon men's fears which 
the preaching of a probation limited to the 
mortal life once maintained. This would be to 
retain in our creed a doctrine so harsh, so un- 
true to God's nature, that we find it impossible 
to preach it, and thus are driven into a silence 
on the whole subject of futurity which men may 
interpret as betraying a lack of any firm con- 
viction of the reality of a future life at all. 

There remains in the minds of many to-day 
just enough nervousness about the old bug-a-boo 
of a hopeless hell to render them unwilling to 
think at all on the subject. The very word is 
tabooed, as it certainly would not be if people 
really believed in an endless hell yawning by 
the brink of every unbelieving grave. For the 
peril of souls, let us hold definitely to one out- 
look or the other. The evangelist Finney before 
his conversion often found his patience tried by 



THE EVERLASTING GOSPEL 19 

the inconsistencies of those who dwelt at ease 
in Zion with the claims of their soul-stirring be- 
liefs. Once when there was a presbytery, asso- 
ciation, conference or some other ecclesiastical 
gathering in his town, the meeting with so many 
white neck-ties under smiling faces upon the 
streets so wore upon Finney's nerves; that com- 
ing upon a deacon whom he knew, he took him 
by the lapels of his coat and shook him vigorously. 
u You're a hypocrite ! " he fiercely ej aculated. 
" You're a hypocrite ! If I believed that a lot 
of the unconverted people of this town were 
going straight down to endless hell; I'd go 
howling through these streets, but that I'd save 
some of them." 

Nowadays, people object to hearing a preacher 
shout ; but friends, the reality of things sometimes 
compels it. I do believe in hell: age-lasting, 
soul-scathing, scorpion-stung, worm-gnawed, 
fire-tortured, unquenchable, non-escapable, nerve- 
racking, blood-curdling, dreary as doubt, rasp- 
ing as rebellion, cruel as crime, sour as selfish- 
ness, livid as lust, and hideous as hate. But in 
the midst of that vision of hell, which else I 
could not bear to look upon, I see One crowned 
with thorns, spear-pierced, nail-scarred, the 
World's eternal Redeemer, saving, saving, sav- 
ing as long as hell lasts, or one lost soul is left 
to save. 

The great Swiss reformer, Zwingli, was priest 
at Einsiedeln when the light of the gospel broke 



20 GOSPEL FOR BOTH WORLDS 

in upon his soul. In that place was the shrine 
of * Our Lady of Einsiedeln ' which had great 
repute for the forgiveness of sins. Over a gate 
of the city was inscribed, " Hie est plena re- 
missio omnium pecatorum " — " Full forgive- 
ness of all sins to be had here." And much of 
the revenue which supported church and priest 
came from the pilgrims to her shrine, not only 
from Switzerland, but from the whole of southern 
Germany. But Zwingli began to tell the pil- 
grims boldly, " Go back to your homes : only 
Jesus saves, and He saves everywhere." God 
give us equal boldness, with widened horizon of 
view, to declare the glorious truth, " Only Jesus 
saves, and He saves everywhere." Yes, down in 
hell. He is able to save unto the uttermost all 
who come unto God through Him. It is His 
very nature to be an eternal Saviour. 

" Dear dying Lamb, Thy precious blood 
Shall never lose its power; 
Till all the ransomed church of God 
Are saved to sin no more. ,, 

This is the everlasting gospel: this is the 
seonian glad tidings which the angel of evan- 
gelism flying in mid heaven has to bear to the 
outermost rim of God's moral universe. Would 
anything else be an everlasting gospel? Would 
it be an everlasting gospel that Jesus came to 
save a millionth part of the immortal souls that 
have flitted or are to flit across the stage of earth, 



THE EVERLASTING GOSPEL 21 

and then to leave the others unsaved to their 
eternal fate? Would it be an everlasting gospel 
that Christ's saving power was to be known by 
a very few for eternity; and dimly felt by myri- 
ads to whom He has been little more than a 
name for only the average of their thirty years 
of mortal life, and then never felt again for com- 
plete salvation in the life beyond? Was it for 
this that He poured out His infinite soul unto 
death on Calvary ? Or was it for this larger hope 
of eternal life, which God that cannot lie prom- 
ised before the times of the ages ; but hath in due 
times made His word plain through preaching 
which is committed also unto me? 

Paul prays for the Ephesian Christians that 
they being rooted and grounded in love may be 
able to comprehend with all saints what is the 
length of the love of Christ. Only love can in- 
terpret love. We know this that His love cannot 
be shorter than our own, and is there one here 
who does not still love some who, in spite of our 
prayers and efforts, have gone unconverted into 
eternity ? Oh, pray on for them, pray on ! Show 
me a verse in all God's blessed Word which for- 
bids us to pray on ! Perhaps, in God's sure plan 
to answer prayer, we may be the very ones who 
may be sent yet to save that loved and wandering 
soul. We may believe that this gospel of Christ's 
atoning love is an everlasting gospel — 



22 GOSPEL FOR BOTH WORLDS 

Third: Because it is a gospel to be 
preached throughout the ages to come. 

If men are to be saved in eternity, they are 
to be saved in the one only way by repentance 
toward God and faith toward our Lord Jesus 
Christ. But how shall they believe in Him of 
whom they have not heard, and how shall they 
hear without a preacher? It has been Christ's 
way through ages past to show Himself to men 
as other men who loved their souls spoke of Him 
to them. He waits for our introduction. He 
could show Himself in a flash to all on earth, to all 
in hell; but the analogy of all the past shows 
that part of the responsibility for lost souls 
knowing Christ will still in eternity be upon the 
kindred souls who love them best. We have this 
treasure in earthen vessels; that the excellency 
of this power may be of God and not of men. 
It was said of a missionary who toiled long in 
Africa, to come back with shattered health and 
few sheaves won for Christ, that he had achieved 
character, the greatest boon of all. Do not some 
of us well-fed, easy-going Christians need to 
achieve character too? When we have done our 
pleasant best on earth ; may not that chief est boon 
come to us yet through mission work in hell? 
The angel flying in mid-heaven symbolizes an 
evangelism wide as the universe, lasting as its 
need. One of the speakers for the Laymen's 
Missionary Movement has been saying that the 



THE EVERLASTING GOSPEL 23 

great essential for the missionary pastor — the 
man who from his home pulpit is to set hearts 
aglow for the world-conquest of Christianity, is 
not necessarily to have his mind richly stored with 
up-to-date missionary information ; but that what 
he needs most is to have the world-vision in his 
soul. I am wondering if what is needed above all, 
both by the missionary in the hugeness of his 
task, and by the home pastor to give his preach- 
ing the supreme thrill and fervor, the fulness of 
the blessing of the gospel of Christ — if what 
each needs supremely is not the greater world- 
vision, the cosmic outlook — to have the whole- 
ness of God's sentient universe often in his soul. 
The field is the kosmos. There is sowing and 
reaping for you and for me broader and longer 
than perhaps we yet have dreamed. 

The Father sent the Son to be the Saviour of 
the universe. So we read in plain Greek. And 
so Charles Wesley has sung — 

" My dear Redeemer and my God, 
I stake my soul on Thy Free Grace; 
Take back my interest in Thy blood, 
Unless it streamed for all the race. 
I stake my soul on this alone, 

THY BLOOD DID ONCE FOR ALL ATONE." 

Friend, have you accepted this infinite world- 
atoning Saviour? Can you say of this Lover of 
Souls in all the worlds and all the ages, " My 
Beloved is mine and I am His " ? Has Jesus 



24 GOSPEL FOR BOTH WORLDS 

spoken peace to your soul? Perhaps you never 
saw Him in all His beauty before. He is wait- 
ing, longing to save you — has waited long, is 
waiting still. I cannot conscientiously say that 
a time will ever come in all the dimness of eternity 
when the heart of Christ will not long to save 
you, if yet unsaved. It is no changeful love that 
you are slighting : it is no mere weak and wistful 
sentimentality that you are grieving. All power 
is given unto Him in heaven and in earth; and 
you are destined to be saved, if omnipotence can 
do it. " All that the Father giveth me will come 
to me," Jesus said: you are given to Him: He 
has bought you with His precious blood: you 
are coming to Him. Though it be along a dread- 
ful, dark, long pathway of ages of wandering ; in 
the end you are coming to Jesus. Will you not 
come this morning? He loves you so: in your 
heart of hearts you love Him too: Christ needs 
you, you need Christ: oh, do not lose another 
moment of the heaven of His love! 

Have you said yes to Jesus, softly just now 
in your soul? Then live to tell others about 
Him. Begin with the one next to you, nearest 
to your influence, dearest to your heart. Learn 
the joy of winning souls to Jesus. It is the 
gladdest work in the world: it is the noblest 
work: it is the work that lasts, and the work 
that never tires. It is not a task which will be 
partial in its results, or one that will end in the 
least sigh of disappointment or regret; but it 



THE EVERLASTING GOSPEL 25 

will go on and on until the whole plan of infinite, 
world-wide, age-lasting salvation is worked out 
to complete success. What we have experienced 
of Christ's salvation here at this hour and what 
we may experience throughout our life is an 
earnest of the salvation of all. He who has saved 
one can save anyone. He who has cared to save 
one must care to save all. He is not willing that 
any should perish. He would have all men to 
be saved. What God wills must be: 

" O Grace, into unlikeliest hearts 
It is thy boast to come: 
The glory of thy light to find 
In darkest spots a home. 

How many hearts thou might'st have had 

More innocent than mine; 
How many souls more worthy far 

Of that sweet touch of thine ! " 

If there is a kindness in God's justice; there 
is certainly a justice in His kindness. He would 
not elect some and not, sooner or later, elect all. 
The wages of sin is death; but the gift of God 
is eternal life through Jesus Christ our Lord. 
He tells us Himself, through the inspired Paul; 
that the free gift is for all. It would not truly 
be free if it wasn't. It is for each, as each can 
be brought to wish for it. So the miracle of 
redemption which has now taken place in your 
heart and in mine; bids us go forth and use our 



m GOSPEL FOR BOTH WORLDS 

touch to help Christ work that miracle in other 
hearts, one by one, day by day, week by week, 
year by year, century by century, aeon by aeon, 
till the last is saved. The important thing for 
which to give glory to God this morning is not 
that we are saved, but that through us others 
are going to be saved on to the end. This be- 
lief gives to the preaching of the gospel, in all 
its manifold forms of endeavor, a dignity greater 
than men have yet appreciated. So let us take 
away with us our watchword of deathless, soul- 
winning endeavor in the paraphrase of two fa- 
miliar hymns — 

Salvation! let the echo swell 

The universe around; 
Till all the hosts of heaven and hell 

Conspire to raise the sound. 

Waft it on time's rolling tide: 

Jesus saves! Jesus saves! 
Tell to spirits far and wide, 

Jesus saves ! Jesus saves 1 

Sing it softly through the gloom, 
Where one heart for mercy craves; 

Sing in triumph, o'er the tomb, 
Jesus saves ! Jesus saves ! 

Give the ages all one voice: 

Jesus saves ! Jesus saves ! 
Bid creation now rejoice: 

Jesus saves! Jesus saves! 



THE EVERLASTING GOSPEL 27 

Shout salvation full and free, 

Heaven's high hills, hell's deepest caves; 

Sing it for eternity- 
Jesus saves! Jesus saves! 



Ill 

OUR UNCHANGING JEHOVAH 

"I am Jehovah, I change not; therefore ye sons of 
Jacob are not consumed. From the days of your fathers 
ye have turned aside from mine ordinances and have not 
kept them: return unto me, and I will return unto you, 
saith the Lord of hosts." — Malachi Hi, 6 and 7. 

The key to every riddle and problem — scien- 
tific, social, political, economic, as well as religious 
— is in a right conception of God. Pope 
sings : — 

" Know well thy part, and seek not God to scan. 
The proper study of mankind is man." 

But we have not even a clue to the nature, 
origin, and destiny of man ; until we learn some- 
thing of the character of the God who made 
man. To understand an air-ship, you must know 
something of the thought of a Zeppelin. Else 
you may be foolish enough to imagine that it 
flies by chance — or evolution. So Bayard Tay- 
lor has more wisely sung — 

" There's naught on earth worth knowing 
Save God and thy own soul/' 

Theology is not only the queen of sciences, but 
the foundation science. Even psychology is all 
a jumble of mystery until, through conscience, 
God is apperceived. The sage of Chelsea, refer- 

28 



OUR UNCHANGING JEHOVAH 29 

ring to the dictum of Greek philosophy, " Tv<o8e 
aeavTov," " Know thyself," declares this self of 
ours forever unknowable. So it is, until I learn 
first whose child I am. We find our real self in 
God. 

The man who believes, or believes he believes, 
in a God who Himself, along with His universe, 
is in a process of evolution has not even a fixed 
standard to judge men by. What is right to- 
day may be only half right, or wholly wrong 
to-morrow. Not even the trend of the world's 
evolution is left within our guess. The man 
who thinks he reads in his Bible that God changes 
in His dealings with men — that God may feebly 
wish to save for a human life-time, and, failing 
that, may relentlessly seek to punish through a 
soul's eternity, that His name may be Love on 
this side the death-line, and implacable Severity 
on the other ; such a reader of the Bible must be 
puzzled by his own better instincts of fair-play 
and kindliness, and bewildered and disturbed to 
find himself superior to his God. 

Of course, no one does quite read his Bible so 
any more. This theology of a two-natured di- 
vinity never was in the Bible — taken as a whole 
— but it has been, in part, read into the Bible 
by the fearfulness of God natural to the partly 
renewed mind, and, in part, it has been foisted 
upon the Bible by that species of priest-craft 
which endeavors to manage men as children have 
been managed, by frightening them with bug-a- 



30 GOSPEL FOR BOTH WORLDS 

boos. Translators, too, have had their responsi- 
ble part. But revelation cannot be inconsistent 
with itself. It is not fair to the Bible to let go 
our clasp on any of its great essential principles 
in order that we may untangle some little puzzling 
web of difficulty about a single text or a parable. 
The letter killeth, but the spirit giveth life. It 
is the whole message of the whole Bible that we 
want. The more we search for that, the more 
we find it bringing conviction to our reason, ac- 
ceptance to our conscience, thrill to our endeavor, 
and gladness to our heart. 

When the Westminster divines were engaged 
in giving form to the principles of Reformed 
evangelical orthodoxy in their Longer and 
Shorter catechisms and their Confession of Faith, 
they came early to the question, " What is God? " 
Each hesitated to suggest an answer. Who 
could put the Infinite into words? Then it was 
proposed that they should pray for God's own 
answer in self-revealing love. One of the younger 
ministers was called upon to lead in prayer, and 
after a silence of some moments, he began trem- 
blingly, " O God, Thou Spirit, infinite, eternal, 
unchangeable in Thy being, wisdom, power, holi- 
ness, justice, goodness and truth," — the prayer 
for the light he went on to pour forth was 
answered in its own beginning. When those men 
of God rose from their knees, it was felt by all 
that the word had been spoken ; and the preamble 



OUR UNCHANGING JEHOVAH 31 

of the prayer was made their answer to the in- 
effable question. 

God is a spirit infinite, eternal, unchangeable 
in His being and in His attributes, one of which 
is justice, another mercy, another power. We 
have reason for the belief, and we have Bible 
for it, page by page, book by book. " I am 
Jehovah," He declares, " I am the I AM ; I 
change not." He who is perfect has no need to 
change. He could not change for the better: 
He could only deteriorate: if He could change, 
He would no longer be God. God is ever new 
as He develops new conditions and faces them: 
He seems ever new in our new appreciation of 
Him. To the unthinking traveler the landscape 
seems to slip by the coach window, to the young 
sailor the shore seems to move. It is we who 
have been moving through the centuries, to scan 
God at a wider angle. Your friend is new to 
you with each new test and expression of his 
friendship ; yet he is the same dear friend in the 
very surprises which he is capable of giving you. 
So God expresses Himself differently, in a meas- 
ure, to each generation ; but the Lord Himself 
can as little change in His attributes as in His 
being. For Him to cease in any way to be just 
or to be merciful would be to cease to be God. 
Justice and mercy have long ago been likened to 
the two arms of God in which He clasps His 
world. He does not carry His universe first in 



32 GOSPEL FOR BOTH WORLDS 

one arm, then in the other ; but in each with equal 
and eternal clasp. God's justice begins its deal- 
ings with men here in this life: God's mercy also 
has its dealings with them to all eternity. We 
are of those who are looking to see the mercy of 
our Lord Jesus Christ unto eternal life. 

God's word is far more emphatic, and explicit, 
and repeated in declaring that His mercy is ever- 
lasting than that His justice cannot change. 
Heaven and earth shall pass, our Saviour tells 
us, but one jot or one tittle shall in no wise pass 
from the law of God until all be fulfilled; but 
over and over we are assured, in one phrase or 
another, that His mercy is forever. Our text 
gives us nearly the last word of the Old Testa- 
ment in a changeless invitation to obdurate wan- 
derers from God. "I am Jehovah: I change 
not: return unto me and I will return unto you 
saith the Lord of hosts." And the last word of 
the New Testament is the same changeless invi- 
tation of God's mercy : " The Spirit and the 
bride say, come, and let him that heareth say, 
come, and let him that is athirst come, and who- 
soever will let him take of the water of life 
freely." Have you ever taken in the breadth of 
God's "whosoever will"? Holy thinkers have 
mused over it in wonder for ages. To the infinite 
bounds of God's moral universe, to the farthest 
reach of hell's distance from His blessed service, 
His mercy's invitation interposes but one condi- 
tion; a willingness to come. Whosoever, whoso- 



OUR UNCHANGING JEHOVAH 33 

ever, whosoever! Let the glad word echo, echo 
out, out, out, and down where the most despair- 
ing soul of all this universe cringes and shudders 
at its fate. Shout and call it into that far soul's 
dulled hearing, until it wakes with a start of 
rapture, crying — 

"That grand word, 'whosoever/ just means 
me." 

It is recorded of God's ancient people that at 
the time of the dedication of Solomon's temple, 
when they had placed the ancient ark of the 
covenant within the holiest place, and when all 
the Levites that were singers stood ready in white 
robes with their cymbals, psalteries, and harps, 
and a hundred and twenty priests with trumpets 
all tuned in accord stood ready; then when they 
sang as with one voice and praised the Lord, say- 
ing, " For he is good, for his mercy is for- 
ever," the house was filled with a cloud, even the 
house of the Lord; so that the priests could not 
stand to minister by reason of the cloud ; for the 
glory of the Lord had filled the house of the Lord. 
So God honored their confession. 

They worship a changeful God who conceive 
of Him as just and merciful in time and only 
just in eternity. Such a god could not right- 
fully use the language of our text, " I am Jeho- 
vah, I change not: return unto me, and I will 
return unto you." If this means anything at 
all; it is an invitation for all eternity. It is 



34 GOSPEL FOR BOTH WORLDS 

because God is changeless in His mercifulness that 
we sinners are not consumed. The Lord will not 
cast anyone off forever; for though He cause 
grief for the aeons of hell, yet will He have com- 
passion according to the multitude of His mercies. 
For He doth not afflict willingly, nor grieve the 
children of men. Our Father is always glad to 
lay aside the rod, and give the kiss. 

Shall mortal man be more just than God? 
Shall a man be more pure than his Maker? God 
desires us to be forgiving : though my brother 
sins against me seven times a day, God would have 
me forgive him. What God wishes us to be, He 
is. We are to be merciful as He is merciful. 
Would that be a standard worth imitating if the 
movings of His mercy toward each only lasted 
for life's little span? Surely we will all agree 
that by God's essential nature, He must yearn to 
be merciful as He is just to all eternity. He is 
not willing that any should perish. Then why 
should they? What God feels reluctant about, 
how can that eternally continue to be? 

This brings us to a thought of even deeper 
import. God is not only infinite, eternal, un- 
changeable in His attributes but also in His pur- 
poses. What God starts out to do, all eternity 
cannot alter. He could not be God, and change 
His mind. " The counsel of the Lord standeth 
forever, the thoughts of his heart to all gener- 
ations." " The world," says Schleirmacher, " is 
one vast will, constantly rushing into life." It 



OUR UNCHANGING JEHOVAH 35 

is not only one vast will, but it is one vast plan. 
Couple infinite will with infinite intelligence and 
you cannot have anything else but immutable de- 
cree. Coming down through history, cropping 
out in the news of yesterday, we can look and 
see the unfoldings of one consistent purpose. 
Scrape away the debris of the mountain side, and 
there lies the ledge. 

"For we doubt not through the ages one increasing 
purpose runs, 
And the thoughts of men are widened with the 
process of the suns." 

All the lines of power that run through this 
universe converge toward a single point. This is 
that — 

" One far-off, divine event 
Toward which the whole creation moves." 

The details of God's vast plan, what finite in- 
telligence can grasp? Who hath known the 
mind of the Lord, or who hath been his counselor? 
None of us can soar ninety millions of miles to 
the sun; but standing at two points upon our 
planet with the distance known between, we can 
sight along straight lines to the sun, measure 
the angle of the sight lines with the base line, and 
compute the distance of the sun. So we can 
sight along the converging lines of God's world- 
plan, and know a little of the end from the be- 
ginning. Jesus outlines the consummation of all 



36 GOSPEL FOR BOTH WORLDS 

things for us when He says, " Even so it is not 
the will of your Father in heaven that one of these 
little ones should perish. 5 ' " Other sheep I have," 
He declares, " which are not of this fold : them 
also I must bring, and they shall hear my voice ; 
and there shall be one fold and one shepherd." 
Oh, see Him bringing them! The Son of Man 
came to seek and to save that which was lost. 

" But none of the ransomed ever knew 
How deep were the waters crossed, 
Or how dark was the night that the Lord passed 

through, 
E'er He found His sheep that was lost." 

" Them also must I bring." Not only of 
earth's fold, not only the ingathering of time's 
searchings. Oh, the terrible journeys in hell the 
Saviour of the lost is taking that at last there 
may be one fold and one shepherd! 

The doctrine of God's election, rightly under- 
stood, instead of being a discouragement to en- 
deavor for our own and others' salvation, is the 
supreme assurance of ultimate universal salvation. 
He who from all eternity has chosen some must 
consistently be planning to save all, some elected 
for this aeon, some for that; all to be saved as 
they freely consent to God's unswerving plan. 
" Hast thou not known ? hast thou not heard, that 
the everlasting God, the Lord, the Creator of the 
ends of the earth, fainteth not, neither is weary? 
There is no searching of His understanding. 



55 



OUR UNCHANGING JEHOVAH 37 

His mercy is forever. This gives us first, a 
key to interpretation ; second, an incentive to faith 
and conduct. 

Take the Bible as a whole: interpret the dark 
things by the light. " God is light, and in Him 
is no darkness at all." There is but one rational 
preconception with which to approach God's rev- 
elation of Himself both in His word and in His 
world, and that is that God is so complete and 
so perfect as to be eternally the same. His Word 
says, " These shall go away into asonian punish- 
ment." " Depart from me, ye cursed, into aeonian 
fire, prepared for the devil and his angels." True ; 
but His mercy is forever. Abraham in the par- 
able says, " Between us and you there is a great 
gulf fixed: so that they which would pass from 
hence to you cannot ; neither can they pass to us 
that would come from thence." Undoubted ; but 
His mercy is forever. This is our rock of infinite 
confidence. I will not deny or minimize one clear 
statement of God's eternal Word; I will endeavor 
to look without mental evasion into its lake of 
torment whose flames go up to the ages of the 
ages; but as I peer across its lurid vista of ag- 
onized soul-faces into that outer darkness where 
there is weeping and gnashing of teeth, where 
their worm dieth not and their fire is not 
quenched; I will still whisper to my inmost soul, 
His mercy is forever! 

How this assurance strengthens faith, how it 
inspires conduct ! You and I have nothing what- 



38 GOSPEL FOR BOTH WORLDS 

ever to trust in for eternity but the fairness of 
God's everlasting mercy. We shudder at the 
thought of trusting our soul in the hands of a 
changeable or a partial God. If His mercy were 
for a day, a month, or a year; if it chose its 
favorites capriciously ; we might wait tremblingly 
amid the glories of heaven's court until our 
season of favor should come to its close, and we, 
in our turn, might be cast aside. Scarcely less 
wretched would be our precarious trust in a God 
who left all to the haphazard choice of His 
creatures, who had no plan of His own by in- 
finite suasion to bring all to His blessed will ; but 
who left men to make utter failures of themselves, 
and then grew weary of caring about them, and 
let them drop away into nothingness. But to 
the Jehovah revealed to us in this blessed volume, 
one whose mercy and whose justice are alike 
changeless and eternal, how easy it is to give our 
quiet trust, our loyal obedience, our undying af- 
fection ! We rest in love like His, and underneath 
are the everlasting arms. There is a love that 
wearies while it fascinates us — so capricious, so 
passionate. There have been theologians who 
would almost represent God's love as like that. 
But our God is one whose love is ever the same. 
It is love while it punishes just as while it par- 
dons, and its punishment is in order to its pardon. 
We might harden our hearts indefinitely against 
a judgment which was merely punitive, and even 
take a certain reckless delight in daring its worst 



OUR UNCHANGING JEHOVAH 39 

penalty. But when we come to look upon hell 
itself as God's great house of correction, where 
He carries on through the ages the sacred task of 
reclaiming immortal souls from sin, and saves men 
' so as by fire ' ; then we no longer have a motive 
for resisting His love, beautiful in severity, eter- 
nally yearning to save. To such a Father God 
as this, which of His children of men will not 
be willing to yield a glad obedience, and a loving 
service? How we will fear to displease Him, 
knowing that He will never give us up to an 
eternity in sin; but in His sweet sternness will 
deal with us faithfully for ultimate reclamation! 
Joseph Cook says, " Our God would not be a 
consuming fire, if He were not an enswathing 
kiss." God punishes to save. Looking out from 
a city casement, we have seen the glorious after- 
noon sun turn fiery red as it sank through the 
horizon's rim of miles of smoke. So infinite love 
is burning wrath, when seen through the atmos- 
phere of sin. God is angry with the wicked 
every day. Yet He commendeth His love toward 
us in that while we were yet sinners Christ died 
for us. It is a terrible thing to fall into the hands 
of the living God. There is no refuge from those 
terrible hands, but in the everlasting arms of 
His mercy. It is not we, but our sin that hell 
burns to consume. Either we must weep for it, 
or burn for it, both here and hereafter. God 
cannot change ; we must, until our hearts are one 
with Him. 



IV 

THE SAME JESUS 

"Whose faith follow, considering the end of their con- 
versation, Jesus Christ the same yesterday, and to-day, 
yea and forever." — Hebrews xiii, 8. 

Jesus Christ yesterday: this carries us a long 
ways back. He says, " Before Abraham was, I 
AM." In the beginning was the Word, and the 
Word was with God, and the Word was God." 
He is the " image of the invisible God, the first 
born of every creature." " He is before all 
things." Let your thoughts go back. Back to the 
geologic ages, when through millions of years our 
earth was forming, layer upon layer — Christ was 
there. Back to the beginnings of creation when 
the star systems were nebulas; back before God 
said, " Let there be light " — Christ was there. 
Back to when there was no universe — Christ was 
there. He had glory with the Father before the 
world was. " By him God made the worlds." 
" By him are all things, and we by him." Who 
made you? The catechism answers, " God." As 
truly it might answer, " Jesus." " The same was 
in the beginning with God: all things were made 
by him, and without him was not anything made 
that was made." " All things were created by 
him and for him, and by him all things hold to- 

40 



THE SAME JESUS 41 

gether." Christ upholds all things by the word 
of His power. 

Even in the beginning, He was a redeemer. 
He is the lamb slain from the foundation of the 
world. When God appointed the foundations of 
the earth, when the morning stars sang together 
and all the sons of God shouted for joy; then 
this eternal Wisdom who had been with God from 
the beginning, * or ever the earth was ' — even 
then His delights were with the sons of men. 
God said to Him, " Let us make men in our 
image." Back of the incarnation, by which 
Christ was found in fashion as a man, stands the 
creation, at which man was made in the image 
of Christ. We belong to each other by a double 
assimilation. Already He was giving Himself 
to us and for us. He was delivered by the de- 
terminate counsel and foreknowledge of God. 
In His eternal life which has no sequences, He 
was already hanging on the cross of Calvary. 
God was laying down His life for us. In this 
sacrifice of the Lamb slain before the foundation 
of the world, Abel's sacrifice of the firstlings of 
his flock found its complement and its acceptance. 

In the Old Testament we read frequently of the 
" Angel of Jehovah," appearing to men and per- 
haps in the next sentence, He speaks as Jehovah 
himself. Now we know that * no man hath seen 
God at any time: the only begotten Son, which 
is in the bosom of the Father, he hath declared 
him ' ; so, we are drawn to identify this ' angel 



m GOSPEL FOR BOTH WORLDS 

of Jehovah ' with Jesus. He it was who called to 
Abraham not to slay Isaac in sacrifice. He had 
the right ; for His own sacrifice was already suffi- 
cient. It was He who spoke to Hagar by the 
fountain in the desert in the same compassionate 
way that was like Jesus, and Hagar called the 
angel, " Thou God seest me." It was He who led 
the children of Israel out of Egypt and who ap- 
peared to Gideon and to Manoah. David knew 
Him as his Lord, Job as his Redeemer, Isaiah as 
" Immanuel, God with us." To Haggai He was 
the " Desire of all nations," to Jeremiah, " The 
Lord our righteousness," to Zechariah, " King 
over all the earth," to Daniel, " Messiah the 
Prince." He came to Abraham sitting in his 
tent door, rescued Lot from Sodom, appeared 
to Isaiah in the temple, and was with the three 
Hebrews in the fiery furnace. Undoubtedly 
Christ is the largest figure in the Old Testa- 
ment. From the promise at the gate of Eden 
to the coming Lord of Malachi's prophecy, 
he stands beside the shifting scenes of Old Testa- 
ment history like an actor in the fly, with heaven's 
glory behind Him, casting His approaching 
shadow upon earth's dimly lighted stage. He is 
prefigured and foretold from beginning to end of 
the volume. He is lifted up in the brazen ser- 
pent, offered in type of sacrificial lambs, por- 
trayed in vision, in psalm, in song, in proverb, in 
life-story, in emblem of sprinkled blood, of scarlet 
thread, of cross mark in forehead. Well might 



THE SAME JESUS 43 

Christ exclaim in coming into the world, " Lo, 
I come ; in the volume of the book it is written of 
me, Sacrifice and offering thou wouldst not; but 
a body hast thou prepared for me.' 5 Well might 
John hail him, " Behold God's Lamb that taketh 
away the world's sin." 

And the Word was made flesh and dwelt among 
us, and we beheld His glory, the glory of the only 
begotten of the Father full of grace and truth. 
In Him God was revealed reconciling the world 
unto Himself. His life and death were one con- 
sistent paradox of divinity shining through lowly 
humanity. Born in a stable; He was heralded 
by angels and pointed out by a star. Reared in 
exile and seclusion; He appeared at John's bap- 
tism and was owned from heaven. Rejected at 
Nazareth; He becomes the wonder worker of 
Galilee. Often hungry and thirsty, He could 
feed a multitude from a lad's lunch basket. 
Worn out and asleep; He rises to rebuke the 
winds and waves. Frequently weary with walk- 
ing ; He could walk upon the waves. He did not 
cry or strive; yet His voice could bring the dead 
to life. Without means to pay His poll tax; a 
fish of the sea yields Him tribute. Despised and 
rejected of men; disease and death obey Him as 
did the centurion's servants. Jeered at in His 
death; the earth quakes, and the sun puts on 
mourning. Executed like a criminal, He takes 
up life again as God. So human He was, so 
sympathetic, so craving of sympathy, so com- 



44 GOSPEL FOR BOTH WORLDS 

passionate, so appreciative of the really good 
things of life; yet He saw Nathaniel under the 
fig tree, He knew where all the fish were swimming 
in the sea, He drove His enemies backward with 
a look ; then died praying for them, and opening 
the door of Paradise to a penitent thief. So He 
completed His life work as a saviour should. 

But no ; He has been living the same life and 
doing the same deeds ever since. The wonderful 
resurrection change to the spiritual body made 
no difference in the heart of Christ. Eagerly He 
sought the company of those who loved Him, of 
those who talked of Him by the way. Eagerly 
He explained to them the purpose of His sacri- 
ficial death. He was their friend still in exalta- 
tion. Nothing could be more natural, more 
chummy even, than the way He called to them in 
the boat after their night's fishing on the sea of 
Galilee; "Boys, have ye any meat?" He dealt 
wistfully with the doubts of Thomas, the former 
unfaithfulness of Peter, and bound them to His 
heart again. And when He rose from their 
midst on the hill-top, He went up looking down, 
His hands outspread, blessing them still. 

But He did not really leave them at all. " I 
will not leave you orphans," He had promised; 
" I will come to you." " A little while and the 
world seeth me no more; but ye see me." The 
history of Christianity has been a continuation 
of the life of Christ. The miracles of His visi- 
ble life-time have been far eclipsed by the wonders 



THE SAME JESUS 45 

of redeeming grace which He has wrought down 
through the centuries, and by the miracle of a 
transformed world which attests His living pres- 
ence and power to-day. Jesus Christ to-day is 
the same mighty Saviour to the millions who are 
trusting their all for time and for eternity 
to Him. Jesus Christ to-day is the world's great 
teacher. Humanity sits at His feet to learn of 
Him. His sayings are quoted from lip to lip. 
His precepts reappear in the noblest thoughts of 
modern men. Christendom is dotted with schools 
that show His influence. The isles wait for His 
law. More and more, across the statute books 
of the nations, across the ledgers of their com- 
merce, across the code of their international rela- 
tions is being written this single law of Jesus, 
Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself. Of the 
increase of His government and peace there 
promises to be no end. Peace on earth, good will 
among men is the sublime miracle He is working 
under our very eyes. Jesus Christ to-day is the 
world's great king. He is king of once barbaric 
lands which He alone has civilized: He is king 
of states blessed with constitutional liberty mod- 
eled on His own magna charta of equality and 
brotherhood, states redeemed from the curse of 
chattel slavery, the cursed traffic in strong drink, 
the curse of sex degradation, and other strong, 
bad things of a day that is almost done. Pilate 
asked Jesus in scornful tolerance, " Art thou a 
king then ? " and Jesus answered, " Thou say est 



46 GOSPEL FOR BOTH WORLDS 

that I am a king." He made His claim in sym- 
bol riding over the brow of Olivet ; and that royal 
progress so humbly begun has wound its way 
down the shadowy canons of the centuries until 
to-day it belts the globe with its hosannas of 
triumph over sin. By all the reforms for which 
the world still strains to the birth, Christ alone 
is king. He is the world's great captain, leading 
its millionfold conflict with wrong. He said, 
" Think not that I am come to send peace on 
earth: I came not to send peace, but a sword." 
He was manifested to bring to nought the works 
of the devil and His age-long fight is still on. 
Jesus Christ to-day is the world's great reformer, 
He is also, just as of old, the world's great healer, 
both of body and soul. Whose are the hospitals, 
whose is the Red-cross League ? Their spirit and 
motive is that of Jesus. World wide medical 
missions carry on Christ's work in Christ's nat- 
ural way. Faith also cures to-day, as when it 
reached to touch the hem of His garment of old 
as He passed. Christ is the great practical 
helper of men to-day. In social service, in many 
types of brotherhood, in every form of benevo- 
lent activity, Christ is the great benefactor. 
Asylums, charities, protective associations, train- 
ing schools : what had the world like these before 
Jesus came? 

Above all, Jesus Christ to-day is the same liv- 
ing, personal Saviour. He is not only in this 
world as of yore going about doing good; but 



THE SAME JESUS 47 

He is in this modern world seeking to save. 
Overwhelming consensus of testimony proves it 
on every side. If you doubt ; try and prove Him 
as your Saviour. If you seek Him really, you 
will find Him real. The daily miracle of an- 
swered prayer will demonstrate the divine Christ 
to you better than every external argument. 
You will know Him whom you have believed. 
Jesus will be the same friend to you as to Lazarus 
or Martha or Mary. He Himself will join you 
in your walk as He joined the two on the way 
to Emmaus. 

" 'Twas a happy, happy day in the olden time 
When the Lord to Bethany came; 
Open wide the door, let Him enter now; 
For His love is ever the same ! " 

This is not mysticism: it is matter of fact, 
demonstrable reality, and just to know Him per- 
sonally is eternal life for you and me. 

Christ to-day is the same mediator between 
God and man. Just as He prayed for His dis- 
ciples in the sacred supper chamber, as He prayed 
for His enemies while hanging upon the cross; 
so He ever liveth to make intercession for us. 

" For if when we were enemies, we were recon- 
ciled to God by the death of His son, much more, 
being reconciled, we shall be saved by His life:" 
Which life? Why the life, the eternal life He is 
living now. He lives to save. If Christ were 
not the same Saviour forever, where would cur 



48 GOSPEL FOR BOTH WORLDS 

hope be? What else have we to trust in but the 
mercy of our Lord Jesus Christ unto eternal 
life? If He doesn't keep on saving, we are lost. 

The next volume of this world's history, and 
the other world's, may well have the same pro- 
logue as that of Luke's Book of Acts : " The 
former treatise have I made, O Theophilus, of 
all that Jesus began both to do and teach." Our 
Lord is still only beginning. He has undertaken 
for the world's salvation, and eternity must be 
allowed Him to finish His task. Jesus Christ 
forever is not a different Jesus, but the same 
Jesus. You remind me that He was and is here 
on earth as our Saviour, but that He is coming 
to be our judge. Has He not been a judge then, 
as well as a saviour, all through the world's his- 
tory? Was he not predicted as a judge? 
Isaiah foretells of the Branch that shall grow out 
of the stem of Jesse, " He shall not judge after 
the sight of his eyes, neither reprove after the 
hearing of his ears ; but with righteousness shall 
he judge the poor, and reprove with equity for 
the meek of the earth; and he shall smite the 
earth with the rod of his mouth, and with the 
breath of his lips shall he slay the wicked." 

He was to come as the Lion of the tribe of 
Judah; His fan was to be in His hand to thor- 
oughly purge His threshing floor. He was to 
reprove with equity for the meek of the earth. 
He was not to fail nor be discouraged till He 
had set judgment in the earth. History has 



THE SAME JESUS 49 

proved the vision. Christ has been the great 
judge among the nations and those that have 
stood for Him have prevailed. In the body long 
ago, He was a judge when He plaited the whip 
of cords and drove the money changers and 
venders from the temple. He was a judge when 
He launched upon scribe and pharisee the seven- 
fold, scathing lightning of His reiterated woe. 
He was a judge when, with aching heart, He 
decreed for Jerusalem, " Behold, your house is 
left unto you desolate." He was a judge when 
His word blasted the barren fig tree. We believe 
in Him as our judge. We would not love Him 
so much, if we did not tremble before Him. He 
will come to judge the quick and the dead; but 
He would have no right to judge, if He were not 
forever trying to save. Not only as long as 
this earth lasts will Christ continue to work in it 
as a teacher, a law-giver, a king, a reformer, a 
healer, a benefactor, a saviour and friend; but 
out in the wide universe, out in the long eternity 
we will find Him still seeking His lost sheep until 
He find it. Would He be the same Jesus forever, 
and not do that? Peter tells us that His spirit 
went from the lifeless body still hanging upon 
the cross to preach His gospel of a completed 
redemption to the spirits in hell's prison. Paul 
declares the same, " That he ascended, what is 
it but that He also descended first into the lower 
parts of the earth ? w Paul's contemporaries lo- 
cated hell and hades there. The Apostles' Creed 



50 GOSPEL FOR BOTH WORLDS 

gives us the same antithesis. " He descended 
into hell: He ascended into heaven." 

Jesus Christ in hell. Whither else in all the 
universe would His heart more readily draw Him? 
Where else could He win such victories of redeem- 
ing grace? Where else could He so fulfil His 
mission of bringing to nought the works of the 
devil? Could He stay out of hell and accomplish 
that? Could He be the omnipresent God, and 
not be in hell? If there at all, how could He 
possibly content Himself, and not go seeking to 
save? I tell you, Christ will make this world of 
ours over yet — far more gloriously than He has 
made it over thus far — but what is infinitely 
more, He will surely make hell over, as truly as 
He is the same yesterday, to-day, and forever. 
Jesus Christ forever will bear the sins and sor- 
rows of the universe, until sin and sorrow will be 
no more. There is meaning and intensity in the 
" yea " of our text. If Christ has been the same 
consistent saviour yesterday and to-day; how 
much more will He be the same forever ! He has 
been the same all along on earth, yea and He will 
be the same saviour in hell. 

And we will be with Him there. Through in- 
finite grace we will be permitted, we trust, to sit 
by His side in heaven, to work by His side in 
hell. We hardly know which will be more glori- 
ous. When we come up from the lurid harvest 
fields of hell, worn with struggle and pity, bring- 
ing our sheaves with us, precious immortal souls 



THE SAME JESUS 51 

snatched as brands from hell's burning, saved so 
as by fire; then we shall see the King in His 
beauty. We shall be like Him; for in hell we 
shall have seen Him truly as He is. We will 
have seen the glory of His deathless, all conquer- 
ing love. So we will join, oh, how rapturously! 
in heaven's completed chorus of praise. And 
what will be its theme ? " To Him who hath 
bought us and redeemed us with His own precious 
blood." We will still praise Him most of all for 
that. As He is the Lamb slain from the founda- 
tion of the world; so He will be to all eternity, 
in the light of heaven's wondering love, the Lamb 
in the midst of the throne, a lamb as it had been 
slain — just our own crucified Jesus: the same 
yesterday, to-day, and forever. 



KNEES THAT WILL BOW 

" Wherefore God also hath highly exalted him, and given 
him a name that is above every name; that at the name 
of Jesus every knee should bow of beings in heaven, and 
in earth, and under the earth; and that every tongue 
should confess that Jesus Christ is Lord to the glory of 
God the Father." — Philippians ii, 9-11. 

This is a great announcement made by One 
who is able to bring it to pass. Among the 
inspired prophecies of Isaiah, God proclaims, 
" I have sworn by myself, the word has gone out 
of my mouth in righteousness and shall not re- 
turn, That unto me every knee shall bow, every 
tongue shall own me." The inspired Paul quotes 
this prophecy in the epistle to the Romans, and 
with its brave words ringing in his soul, here 
in Philippians applies it to Christ. All will 
agree that God is able to bring it to pass. With 
one mighty sweep of the wind of the spirit He 
could make all hearts bow — in heaven, in 
earth, in hell. To the ancient mind, Sheol, 
Hades, Gehenna were under the supposedly 
plane surface of the earth. The promise of our 
text refers in turn to spirits beneath as well as 
to those above. 

But God does not care to have the homage of / 
unwilling knees. All knees eventually will bow 
to Jesus; because all intellects will be convinced 

52 



KNEES THAT WILL BOW 53 

that He is Lord, all hearts will learn to love 
and trust in Him, all wills shall willingly yield 
to His. It is His right, and He would rather 
wait than have it yielded by constraint. It is 
as true of one as of another that we are not 
our own, we are bought with a price — not with 
corruptible things as silver and gold, but with 
the precious blood of Christ. " When thou 
shalt make his soul an offering for sin, he shall 
see his seed." God has given all to Jesus, and 
He says confidently, " All that the Father 
giveth me will come to me. 



9* 



" Secure I fold my hands and wait, 
Nor care for wind, or tide, or sea; 
I rail no more 'gainst time and fate; 
For what is mine will come to me. 

I stay my haste, I make delays; 
For what avails this eager pace? 
I stand amid the eternal ways, 
And what is mine will know my face. 

The stars come nightly to the sky, 
The tidal wave unto the sea: 
Nor time nor space, nor deep nor high 
Can keep my own away from me." 

If you or I can rest in such confidence, how 
much more can the Lord of glory? Christ holds 
out His arms to all the world: "Come unto 
me ! " He cries, but waits for each to come will- 
ingly. He will have no soul dragged to His 



54 GOSPEL FOR BOTH WORLDS 

feet. There can be no real submission that 
isn't heart-submission. I have seen parents 
who seemed satisfied to have their children 
cower and obey: would it satisfy you? Even 
if all hell should bow the knee to Christ, cower- 
ing and cringing in its fear, and covering a 
secret hate; would that satisfy our Saviour? 
He has given His love: nothing but love can 
compensate Him in return. He could hypnotize 
hell into passive endurance of torment without 
a curse to snarl back at its judge. God could 
have been worshiped by a race of moral 
puppets all these ages, if He had cared. 

I have read of a Georgia revivalist in a 
former day who had been appealed to during a 
camp meeting by a mother concerned for the 
salvation of her graceless son. As he preached 
that day, his eyes continually returned to the 
young man's furtive face. He leveled his long 
finger at him again and again. He stretched out 
his arms to him, as he invited penitents to the 
altar. He beckoned to him, while going up 
and down the aisles between plank benches start- 
ing sinners to the mourners' bench. Finally 
patience seemed to have ceased to be a virtue. 
The tall form of the evangelist strode in among 
the crowded seats. He pleaded with the young 
fellow clinging to his bench. Then he got him 
in a tender but altogether irresistible embrace, 
lifted him in air above the heads of those 
sitting around, carried him bodily to the 



KNEES THAT WILL BOW 55 

mourners' bench and deposited him, exclaiming, 
" There ! you'll go through the motions any- 
way." When we are told that unto Jesus every 
knee shall bow: God does not promise merely to 
put all through a motion. An immortal spirit 
can only be said to bow the knee when its whole 
being freely bows. True worshipers must 
worship in spirit and in truth; for the Father 
seeketh such to worship Him. We take it that 
when God tells us every knee shall yet bow to 
our Christ, He means that they shall bow in 
w r orship. " When he bringeth the first begotten 
into the world, he saith, And let all the angels 
of God worship him." And " unto the Son, he 
saith, Thy throne, O God, is forever and ever." 
Christ's name is above every name — human 
names, angelic names. No name in this uni- 
verse stands higher, for He and the Father are 
one. The same promise is here applied to 
Christ which in Isaiah and Romans we find ap- 
plied to God. " Unto me every knee shall bow." 
" At the name of Jesus every knee should bow." 
Those who have loved Him and followed Him 
on earth, yet have not fully understood His 
divine nature; those who have taken His name 
in vain in careless oaths ; those who from infancy 
have learned to hate the name of Jesus: every 
created being which is in heaven, and on the 
earth and under the earth will be falling down 
before the Lamb at last and saying, " Blessing, 
and honor, and glory, and power be unto Him 



56 GOSPEL FOR BOTH WORLDS 

that sitteth upon the throne and unto the Lamb 
forever and ever." They will bow the knee in 
equal worship to the Two who are One. 

At the name of Jesus every knee shall bow, 
not only in submission, but in allegiance. It 
was said of Alexander the Great that he con- 
quered his enemies twice — first with the sword, 
then with the exceeding kindness of his clem- 
ency. Will the Captain of our salvation be less 
humane? He punishes as justice must; yet He 
punishes only to save. " Before I was afflicted 
I went astray," David admits : " It is good for 
me that I have been afflicted; that I might learn 
thy statutes, 



» 



" There is no God, the foolish saith, 
But none, There is no sorrow; 
And nature oft the cry of faith 
In bitter need will borrow. 
Eyes that the preacher could not school 
By wayside graves are raised, 
And lips cry, ' God be pitiful ! ' 
That ne'er said, ' God be praised ! ' " 

Friends, I believe there is no place in all this 
universe where God's love yearns more eagerly 
to mature and mellow the sweet uses of adversity 
than down in hell. I have asked you parents 
if you will any of you be content to have the 
slavish cowering submission of your children: 
I ask you now if you do not pride yourself in 
finding ways to win their hearty obedience, so 



KNEES THAT WILL BOW 57 

free, so voluntary, so ingrained in principle, and 
so spontaneous in love's gladdest impulses that 
you can trust it anywhere out of your sight? 
Is not God such a parent as this? Will He 
not find ways far different from coercion to make 
all knees bow? "As I live, saith the Lord God, 
I have no pleasure in the death of the wicked; 
but in order that the wicked turn from his way 
and live." God punishes terribly that He may 
forgive eagerly, when we repent. A punished 
child clung sobbing to her father, even kissing 
his hands. " What makes you love me so after 
I have chastened you?" he asked. "Because I 
know you do it to make me good." There are 
those who will love much, because they have been 
much punished, in order that they might be much 
forgiven. Oh, how gratefully these will bow at 
the blessed nail-pierced feet at last: how they 
will kiss the rod which has smitten them into 
penitence, and the grace that has sought and 
found them in hell's darkest caves of sin ! These 
are the last that shall be first — first in the 
wondrous story they will have to tell; first in 
their joy of greatest deliverance; first in their 
zeal; not to make amends, Christ alone can do, 
has done that; but in their zeal to serve freely 
where they have been forgiven freely, and to 
win other souls from sin's strange thralldom. 
Their allegiance will be the more hearty because 
it has been long delayed, and their faith in 
Christ will be the stronger because they have 



58 GOSPEL FOR BOTH WORLDS 

waited so long to know Him, Think with what 
feeling such a redeemed one can sing at last : — 

" I am lowest of those who love Him; 
I am weakest of those who pray; 
But I come as He has bidden. 
And He will not say me, nay. 

The mistakes of my life have been many, 

My spirit is sick with sin, 
And I scarce can see for weeping; 

But the Saviour will let me in. 

My mistakes His free grace will cover, 

My sins He will wash away, 
And the feet that shrink and falter 

Shall walk thro' the gates of day. 

I know I am weak and sinful, 
It comes to me more and more; 

But when the dear Saviour shall bid me come in, 
I'll enter the open door." 

Yes, every knee shall bow, and every tongue 
shall confess Jesus as its Lord, to the glory of 
God the Father. Nothing else could possibly 
glorify Him. Is a great king glorified by the 
number of his sub j ects in irons and in dungeons ? 
Is he not rather glorified by the multitudes of 
free men praising his beneficence in righting 
wrong? There are prohibition towns where 
they take visitors first of all and with greatest 
pride to see the empty jail. Friends, God is 



KNEES THAT WILL BOW 59 

working toward an empty hell. There are no 
lands on this planet more forward in social and 
political progress than Australia and New 
Zealand, which came into touch with civilization 
ao penal colonies. How God will be glorified 
when knees in hell begin to bow! There is joy 
in the presence of the angels of God over 
one sinner that repenteth anywhere, always. 
How heaven must rejoice over repentant ones 
in hell! Are there none? Then this text is 
a lie. Blot it out of your Bible; for it lies. 
Blot out all the texts upon which we have al- 
ready been reflecting in this series. Each is a 
lie. Take the text ; " God is love " : blot it out ; 
that is a lie. A loving God could not possibly 
keep a hopeless hell. A friend who was super- 
intendent of a rescue mission tells me of a night 
when they prayed long with a poor drunkard 
after the meeting. He wept and prayed for 
himself; but found no hope. At last, in sheer 
weariness, they led him from the room and as 
they closed the door behind them, they said to 
him : " You are too drunk, to-night : go home 
and pray and come again sober." He reeled a 
few yards down the pavement; then fell across 
the curb and broke his neck. My friend has 
a hopeless regret ; but I say to him, " Will not 
such a contrite heart repent in hell and be 
saved? " " Him that cometh unto me," Jesus 
said, " I will in no wise cast out." Our Lord 
did not make any limitations: why should we? 



60 GOSPEL FOR BOTH WORLDS 

The knees that do not bow to Christ on earth, 
will bow in hell. How do I know that? Be- 
cause God's word here tells me so. Because 
every instinct of the believing soul, and every 
rational conclusion of the inquiring mind tell us 
so. " As I live, saith Jehovah, unto me every 
knee shall bow." Holland in the conclusion of 
his " Katrina " tells of the voices that spoke to his 
soul, after his prayerless life, by his wife's 
dying bed. The wife speaks to their weeping 
daughter, — • 

"'Be silent, dear! 
Your father kneels to pray. Make room for him, 
That he may kneel beside you/ 

At her words 
I was endowed with apprehensions new; 
And somewhere in my quickened consciousness 
I felt the presence of her heavenly friends, 
And knew that there were spirits in the room. 
I did not doubt, nor have I doubted since, 
That there were loving witnesses of all 
The scenes enacted round that hallowed bed. 
Ay and they spoke. Deep in the innermost 
I heard the tender words, ' O ! kneel, my son ! ' — 
A sweet monition from my mother's lips. 
4 Kneel ! kneel ! ' It was the echo of a throng. 
* Kneel ! kneel ! * The gentle mandate reached my 

heart 
From depths of lofty space. It was the voice 
Of the Good Father. 

From the curtain folds 
That rustled at the window, in the airs 



KNEES THAT WILL BOW 61 

That moved with conscious pulse to passing wings 
Came the same burden ' Kneel ! ' 

'Kneel, kneel! O! kneel!' 
In tones of earnest pleading came from lips 
Already pinched by death. 

A hundred worlds, 
Imposed upon my shoulders, had not bowed 
And crushed me to my knees with surer power. 
The hand that lay upon my daughter's head 
Then passed to mine; but still my lips were dumb. 

* Pray ! ' said the spirit of my mother. 

'Pray!' 
The word repeated came from many lips. 

* Pray! ' said the voice of God within my soul; 
While every whisper of the living air 
Echoed the low command. 

' Pray ! pray ! O ! pray ! ' 
My dying wife entreated, while swift tears 
Slid to her pillow. 

Then the impulse came, 
And I poured out like water all my heart." 

Some day, somewhere those voices* will speak 
to the soul of everyone. Some day, somewhere 
the stubbornest knees will bend, the hardest heart 
will plead for mercy. God's word tells us so. 
" That at the name of Jesus every knee should 
bow." The skeptic some day will bow: his last 
question answered: his last objection overborne; 
and cry with doubting Thomas, " My Lord and 
my God ! " Same day the last persecutor's knee 
will bow to ask with Saul of Tarsus, " Lord, 
what wilt Thou have me to do." Last of all, even 



62 GOSPEL FOR BOTH WORLDS 

the hypocrite will some day learn truly to pray, 
and beg, along with Simon Magus, that honest 
men will entreat God's pardon on his most sinful 
soul of all. Oh, look and see them, out in 
eternity, bowing spirits' knees to Jesus! The 
spirit of Cain is claiming Christ's expiatory 
sacrifice in place of its own futile thank offering. 
The spirit of Pharaoh is bowing to the King 
of kings. Pharisees and Sadducees, Pilate and 
Herod and Judas kneel. Nero and Marcus 
Aurelius and Julian pray. Socrates, Zoroaster 
and Confucius sit at the feet of Jesus. Alexan- 
der and Napoleon lay their crowns before Him. 
Huxley finds his soul, and Theodore Parker 
owns his Lord. Even Ingersoll learns rev- 
erence. Ear out in hell, boldest rebellious 
spirits are yielding to love's absolutism, and 
pleading for forgiveness in the name of the 
Saviour who died also for them. Look! look! 
even demons bow the knee. Oh, wonderful re- 
deeming love! hear each exclaiming in turn, 
" There's grace enough for me ! " Wait — 
what do we see? The Father of Evil himself 
yields to the power of conviction of sin. His 
last self-deceiving argument for continued 
rebellion has failed him. Love in severity has 
robbed him of his last motive for continuance 
in sin. He sees himself somewhat as God sees 
him. Shame, contrition, yearning for forgive- 
ness overpower him. He realizes that there is 
no atonement he can make. The eternity still 



KNEES THAT WILL BOW 63 

to be is too short for reparation. With an 
infinite sob, he stoops to the nail-pierced feet 
where alone there is pardon for such as he, for 
such as you, for such as I. He who once tempted 
Christ by the price of all the kingdoms of the 
world to give one bow, now bows the knee. Oh 
joy! oh glory! the great Enemy has yielded. 
The Adversary has become a convert. Saved 
ones stand on tip-toe; angels whisper it across 
the farthest reach of heaven, " Behold he 
prayeth ! " The bitter hate of ages melts away 
from the blackest heart of the universe. Love 
waves the banner of eternal triumph on its last 
battlefield as Satan bows the adoring knee to 
Christ, crying, " Be merciful to me a sinner ! " 

Now the Father God is completely glorified. 
His love is glorified; for it has won over the 
last and most malignant enemy. His power is 
glorified; for it has subdued even the hearts of 
His foes. His justice is glorified; because it has 
provided an atonement which avails for infinite 
crimes. His eternal foreknowledge is glorified; 
because it has foreseen this all-satisfying end 
from the beginning. His wisdom is glorified for 
having conceived a plan of salvation which has 
proved all-embracing and has brought out the 
world really gladder and better than if nothing 
had ever gone wrong in it. God's fatherhood is 
glorified as never before; for the great prodigal 
son of God has come to himself and returned to 
his Father's house. 



VI 
THE GATES NEVER SHUT 

"And the city had no need of the sun, neither of the 
moon, to shine in it: for the glory of God did lighten it, 
and the Lamb is the light thereof. And the nations of 
them which are saved shall walk in the light of it: and 
the kings of the earth do bring their glory and honor 
into it. And the gates of it shall not be shut at all by 
day: for there shall be no night there." — Revelation xxi, 
23-25. 

So St. Peter at the closed gate is all wrong. 
Here we have a city with twelve gates, and all 
of them wide open. 

It is true that Our Lord said to Peter, " I will 
give unto thee the keys of the kingdom of 
heaven: and whatsoever thou shalt bind on earth 
shall be bound in heaven ; and whatsoever thou 
shalt loose on earth, shall be loosed in heaven." 
But He said the same with regard to all Christian 
friendships as a warning against severing them 
lightly. Every worker for God carries keys to 
the kingdom of heaven. Each text of the 
preacher or teacher is a key. One will admit 
one soul, one another soul into the kingdom of 
heaven, which is one kingdom here and hereafter. 
Take that key; John iii, 16, " God so loved the 
world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that 
whosoever believeth in Him should not perish, 
but have everlasting life." Take this key, 
John i, 12, " But as many as received him, to 

64 



THE GATES NEVER SHUT 65 

them gave he power to become the sons of God, 
even to them that believe on his name." How 
many souls have entered the kingdom just by 
these two keys! It is your high privilege as 
well as mine to carry such keys and admit many 
a precious soul to the kingdom of heaven, know- 
ing assuredly that those thus truly bound to 
Christ on earth will be bound to Him in heaven. 

The more modern traditional picture of the 
angel in charge of the high, locked gate is equally 
untrue to our text. We read earlier in this 
chapter that the heavenly city John saw had 
a wall great and high, and had twelve gates, 
and at the gates twelve angels; but as these 
gates are here spoken of as never shut ; we should 
rather think of the attendant angels as there to 
sound out the call of invitation to the open gates. 

No man nor angel will have a right to stand 
over closed gates at last admitting applicants to 
a locked and guarded heaven. Jesus says, " I 
am the way, the truth, and the life: no man 
cometh unto the Father but by me." " I am 
the door: by me if any man enter in, he shall 
be saved." Thank God! the heart of Christ is 
not a locked and guarded door to heaven; but 
one wide open to every needy soul. 

And yet we are told in the closing verse of 
this chapter about the city : " There shall in 
no wise enter into it anything that defileth." 
The gate stands open; yet some cannot enter. 
That is because the inability is in themselves. 



66 GOSPEL FOR BOTH WORLDS 

Heaven would be horrible to the hypocrite: it 
would be torture to the depraved. Impurity 
would shrink from its light, and hate would be 
forever repelled by its love. How can oppo- 
site poles of free magnets be taught to approach 
one another? Are high walls and barred gates 
needed to keep them forever apart from each 
other? 

Birds of a feather flock together. Like seeks 
like. The great gulf fixed between Lazarus 
and Dives need only be the gulf between soul 
and selfishness, between manhood and beasthood, 
between virtue and vice, between holiness and 
hypocrisy. When all souls stand free and bare, 
the law of congeniality will solve the problem 
of separation. 

Wide open gates; but paralyzed souls cannot 
walk into them. There is no need of chains to 
hold you under the sea, when your heart is lead. 
Like Judas, each goes to his own place. All the 
craft of hell couldn't keep him from doing it. 
The man without the wedding garment needs 
little force to cast him out. With confusion of 
face, he will slink to the outer darkness. Hell is 
the covert of unwashed souls. The utmost 
horror of hell will be its aversion for heaven. 
The fascination which the flame has for the 
moth, which the serpent exerts upon its pray, 
will make sin-tortured souls prefer to be in hell. 
The man who leaves his cheery home, with its 
nestling affections, for the saloon, the gambling 



THE GATES NEVER SHUT 67 

den, the club, and the brothel already has his 
destination in eternity written upon his soul's 
forehead. He is infatuated with hell. Ephraim 
is joined to his idols. Draw him if you could 
into the center of heaven's innocent mirth and 
sweet purity. He will be homesick for hell, his 
father's house. Inevitably, with an unchanged 
heart, he will return to hell like a dog to its 
vomit, and as a sow that was washed to her wal- 
lowing in the mire. 

But hell, you say, is a prison house of irk- 
someness. So is the stock exchange to its most 
eager gambler. So is society's drawing-room 
to the blase dilettante. Perhaps the most cruel 
punishment of sin is the conflict it creates in the 
man's will. The evil that I would not, that I 
do. The soul lacerates itself with its own hate 
— and hates the more. Without repentance 
for sin, to wish that we might leave hell, even 
with weeping and gnashing of teeth, would be 
only to shut ourselves further in. The damned 
soul that raves and struggles and curses its fate 
is thus the deeper damned. Many shall seek to 
enter in; but shall not be able. Hell has many 
doors all opening inward and downward: there 
can be only one door opening out. " I am the 
Door," Jesus says. 

If I may put the truth as it comes to me into 
the form of a vision of the future world; I see 
the city glorious with gates, three in a side, so 
wide, it is as if there were no walls. To each 



68 GOSPEL FOR BOTH WORLDS 

gate an avenue of light converges from the 
outermost rim of the universe, and white robed 
throngs press in freely, unchallenged, for each 
comer has a Name in his forehead. King and 
peasant press in side by side, having white robes 
and with palms in their hands. They bring the 
glory and honor of the nations, the constella- 
tions into it. The gates open to every quarter 
of God's sentient universe; for which reason 
there are three on a side; and yet far out and 
down I see a vast shadowland teeming with 
alien souls who have no entrance into the city. 
Many of these I see lifting up their eyes, being 
in torment, straining their vision out of the 
mirk to catch some vista of Paradise. Some I 
see striving confidently to climb thither that they 
may enter one of the open gates. They ask no 
help, they crave no pity, they seek no king's 
highway ; but doggedly, self-confidently, even 
rebelliously they strive to go up each some other 
way. I see them approach assured of success, 
and then I see them suddenly blown like chaff 
away, away. I see them rebound as if from 
some invisible elastic barrier. And when I ask 
the giver of the vision, I am told that something 
within the soul of the seeker himself causes the 
rebound. Until that strange something within 
is neutralized and taken away, each may toil 
and climb, and strain over and over again, he 
may come about so near to the open pearly 
gate, but he can never, never hope to enter in. 



THE GATES NEVER SHUT 69 

Who then will enter the gates that are never 
shut? We find the answers near our text and 
they are plain to the reason of every thoughtful 
soul. First: there is entrance there for those 
who do the King's commandments. We read, 
" Blessed are they that do his commandments, 
that they may have right to the tree of life and 
that they may enter in through the gates into 
the city." " Blessed are the pure in heart ; for 
they shall see God." It has been well said that 
heaven's gates are wide enough to admit many 
sinners ; but too narrow to admit any sin. Who 
enters there must leave sin behind. Heaven is 
character. While no man is saved by his works ; 
each must be saved into holiness, without which 
no man can see the Lord. It is exactly be- 
cause all real right doing is God's work in us, 
and not in any sense our own achievement, ex- 
cept as we yield ourselves, consciously or uncon- 
sciously, to the saving power of the indwelling 
Christ; it is exactly for this reason that we are 
compelled to demand of ourselves and have a 
right to expect in others a changed life as a 
proof of acceptance with God and as the condi- 
tion of a reasonable hope of heaven. You 
say, " Did not Jesus promise heaven to the peni- 
tent thief? " Yes, but it was to one who had just 
shown contrition for his deeds, and an humble 
longing for better things. He did not promise it 
to him to encourage you or me in any kind of re- 
spectable thieving. Did He not refuse to con- 



70 GOSPEL FOR BOTH WORLDS 

demn the woman taken in adultery? Yes, but 
He told her to go and sin no more. He doesn't 
wish any of us to imagine that He will condone 
even that adultery of the heart of which He 
speaks so sternly in any one of us. You'll 
have to quit that, sir, or stay out of heaven. 
"Be not deceived: God is not mocked: whatso- 
ever a man soweth that shall he also reap." 
Continuing in sin can never make grace abound. 
On the contrary, it will kill the grace out of your 
heart in spite of all manner of pious expedients. 
" Why call ye me, Lord, Lord," Jesus says, 
" and do not the things which I say? " " Many 
shall say unto me in that day, Lord, Lord, have 
we not prophesied in thy name? and in thy name 
have cast out devils? and in thy name done many 
wonderful works? And then will I profess unto 
them, I never knew you : depart from me, ye that 
work iniquity." 

Heaven's gate knows no compromises with 
sin-lovers, however plausible. Heaven is for 
honest men. 

" Poor sad humanity 
Turns back with bleeding feet, 
By the weary way it came, 
Unto the simple thought 
By the great Master taught, 
And that remaineth still: 
Not he that repeateth the name, 
But he that doeth the will/' 



THE GATES NEVER SHUT 71 

" If a man love me," Jesus says, " he will keep 
my instruction," and surely heaven could not 
be heaven to one who did not love his Saviour. 
What could be more self-evidently true than the 
chorus of the old-time revival hymn : — 

" Oh you must be a lover of the Lord, 
Or you can't go to heaven when you die " ? 

Dear friend, do you love God? Are you try- 
ing by Christ's help to please Him perfectly? 
It is worth while for you to stop and think about 
this a moment; because, you know, so much de- 
pends upon it. 

" 'Tis a point I long to know ; 

Oft the theme of anxious thought: 
Do I love the Lord or no? 
Am I His or am I not." 

You reply, " I cannot love Him in an inter- 
ested way — just to gain heaven thereby." No; 
a thousand times no. Love Him, because you 
have let Him save you. Love Him, because you 
cannot help it. If you can help loving God in 
Christ; heaven is no place for you. You would 
be like a cat in a strange garret. Until you 
have a heart to love God your Saviour, you have 
no heart for heaven. You will really be more 
comfortable elsewhere. Go on living your cold, 
correct life. Go on flaunting your self-made, 
self-satisfied, unimpeachable correctness in God's 
face for a while, here if you will : I defy you 



?5 



n GOSPEL FOR BOTH WORLDS 

to take it into heaven and flaunt it there. You 
will not have on the wedding garment: your 
righteousness will show as filthy rags in heaven's 
light. You have pleased yourself with your 
morality all your life: you have never pleased 
God. You have not done the first thing He com- 
mands you. " Thou shalt love the Lord thy 
God with all thy heart." " This is the work of 
God, that ye believe on him whom he hath sent 
" Without faith it is impossible to please God 
because we cannot do His will except by trusting 
in His great help. We may measure up to our 
own standard: we may possibly measure up to 
our neighbor's standard for us; but who can 
dare to think that he has measured up to God's 
standard ; — " Be ye perfect even as your Father 
in heaven is perfect." So we come to realize 

that admission to heaven's open gate belongs 

Secondly: to the blood-washed and redeemed. 
Isaiah tells us, " The redeemed of the Lord shall 
walk there." And John, here in Revelation, is 
told of the great multitude before the throne, 
" These are they which have come out of great 
tribulation, and have washed their robes, and 
made them white in the blood of the Lamb." 

For beings of any sphere who have never 
known sin or defilement, heaven's gates of course, 
stand open wide; but for the spirit which in its 
whole existence has harbored one impure or re- 
bellious thought there must be an atonement, a 
redemption, a washing in some fountain open 



THE GATES NEVER SHUT 73 

for sin and for uncleanness. One who had 
never heard of the all-sufficient redemption of our 
Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ; might, by mus- 
ing upon the majesty of God's moral law, the 
impossibility of making a wrong past right 
ourselves, readily reach the unanswerable con- 
clusion that somewhere, some time God had pro- 
vided an infinite sacrifice for sin, somewhere a 
divine Saviour had died that sinners might live. 
He might confidently explore the history of 
race by race, or signal questioningly from planet 
to planet in search of the one great atonement 
which a just and loving God must necessarily 
have provided for sinful ones, that they might 
be redeemed and sanctified and brought back 
home to His heart again. How else could He 
be just, and yet a justifier of those imperfect 
ones who diligently seek to be reconciled to 
Him? God cannot be God, and open heaven's 
gates to guilty rebels, saying simply, " Never 
mind about your past." " The soul that sin- 
neth it shall die." There is no alternative ex- 
cept that the sinless infinite One should die in 
his stead. 

There is no way for lost and ruined sinners 
like us to reach heaven's gate ; but past the cross 
of Calvary. Consciously or unconsciously, 
here or hereafter, each must get under the blood, 
the precious blood of Christ that cleanseth from 
all sin. Our own amendment will not bring us 
to heaven's gate: our prayers and tears will 



74 GOSPEL FOR BOTH WORLDS 

never bring us there, except as these movings 
toward God and goodness may unconsciously 
lay hold upon Christ. 

" Nor alms nor deeds that I have done 
Can for a single sin atone; 
To Calvary alone I flee. 
O God, be merciful to me ! " 

You say you have heard this so often. Thank 
your God, dear friend, that you are hearing it 
again; for in its offer the way to heaven's gate 
is pointed out again to you. Along a well kept 
highway many sign posts say nearly the same 
thing. Christ challenges you to find any other 
way. He is your only hope. That which com- 
pels the assent of our reason should be heard 
over as often as need be, until we are moved 
to appropriate action. Get under the blood, 
brother. Nothing else can wash away your 
sin. All the seas could not wash Lady Mac- 
beth's little white hand. But the precious blood 
of Christ which cleanseth from all sin can wash 
the guiltiest soul white for entrance at the pearly 
gate. 

No sin-stains in heaven: heaven is the spotless 
town. If we say we have no sin; we deceive 
ourselves, and the truth is not in us. If we 
confess our sins, God through Christ is faithful 
and just to forgive us our sins, and to cleanse 
us from all unrighteousness. 



THE GATES NEVER SHUT 75 

"We are sweeping through the gates of the New 
Jerusalem, 
Washed in the blood of the Lamb." 

Heaven is only for these two : those who have 
never sinned, and those who have been redeemed 
from sin. Which class will we claim as our own, 
and thereby feel most sure of entering heaven, 
most sure of feeling restfully our right to be 
there? 

For the redeemed, who keep His command- 
ments: under this double condition we find near 
our text that entrance through the open gates 
of heaven is eternally promised — In the third 
place: to whosoever wills to enter there. This is 
the crowning word of sacred revelation: this is 
its last inspired gleam of the vision of the here- 
after. " The Spirit and the bride say, Come. 
And let him that heareth say, Come. And let 
him that is athirst come. And whosoever will, 
let him take the water of life freely, 



55 



Whosoever heareth shout, shout the sound; 
Send the blessed word the universe around; 
Spread the glorious news wherever sin is found; 
Whosoever will may come. 

Whosoever will! whosoever will! 
Send the proclamation over earth and hell, 
'Tis the loving Father calls each wanderer home: 
Whosoever will may come! 



76 GOSPEL FOR BOTH WORLDS 

There is no time limit to this invitation: it 
goes from the gates that never, never will be 
shut; it sounds out wistfully, yearningly, cease- 
lessly, eternally from heaven's gates, from 
heaven's home, from heaven's heart ; — " Come ! 
oh, come ! still come ! " It echoes down the de- 
files of the centuries ; it sounds above the clamor 
and the wassail of a troubled planet: it is re- 
peated in every language and tongue; it thrills 
this world and this universe with its longing; it 
is caught from lip to lip, from soul to soul. 

" Pass along the invitation, whosoever will may 

come." 

Aye, pass it on! It is for all climes, for all 
ages, for the centuries that are near at hand and 
for the eternities that are still to come. As long 
as God's heart throbs in pity, as long as one 
lost soul lingers in outer darkness, the precious 
invitation will sound on. Heaven is for who- 
soever will. Whosoever will turn his back upon 
sin — on earth, in hell ; whoever will cry to God 
for mercy; whoever will stretch his empty arms 
of faith toward the infinite Saviour; whosoever 
will believe on the only begotten Son God gave 
for love of His kosmos shall not perish any- 
where, but shall have everlasting life. If the 
invitation meant less; it would not truly be a 
whosoever. A limited whosoever is no whosoever. 
God would not put out a fake invitation. To 
be a true ' whosoever ' the invitation must be made 



THE GATES NEVER SHUT 77 

known as well and familiarly to one as to an- 
other. In the long run of the ages, every soul 
must have the gospel message as plainly as the 
most favored ones of earth. Each must feel 
the Spirit's pleading. Otherwise it is simply 
not a ' whosoever.' God is not mocked ; neither 
will He mock. Omnipotent love is pressing this 
invitation, " Whosoever will may come." God 
is following men up with it and will to all 
eternity, until the last one comes. If you have 
not yet yielded to His loving invitation; yield 
to-day. You only make it harder for yourself 
— nothing is hard for God — by your delaying. 
If you must see hell; be sure God's love will 
seek you out there ; but oh the loss and wretched- 
ness meanwhile for you! Oh the endless regret 
to chasten heaven for you afterwards ! " Turn 
ye! turn ye; for why will ye die? " I have en- 
deavored to point you out the straight road to 
heaven's open gate down low by the cross of 
Calvary. If you prefer to go a terrible long 
way round through hell; until, with the anguish 
of multiplied remorse, you find yourself there low 
at the cross saved as by fire at last where you 
might find pardon and peace and abundant en- 
trance to-day; all I can say is, You poor fool, 
God pity you because of the infinite debt of 
rejected love you are piling up for the sure 
reckonings of eternity. 

No, you will come to-day. Now is the ac- 
cepted time: now is the day of salvation: to-day 



78 GOSPEL FOR BOTH WORLDS 

if ye will hear His voice, harden not your hearts. 
Heaven's gate stands open wide to you to-day, 
and oh! thank God! you are turning into the 
way. Now it only remains to beckon to others: 
let him that heareth say come. Together, hand 
in hand, singing the song of the redeemed, we 
will go sweeping in at the ever open gate. By 
God's help we will go out and find others in 
hell's shadow land and bring them in; for while 
there is one still left without; the call will echo 
through the universe, echo through the emptied 
caverns of perdition ; yet there is room. 



, 



VII 
THE SACREDNESS OF HELL 

"These shall go away into aeonian punishment; but the 
righteous into life aeonian." — Matt, xxv, Ifi. 

Did you ever hear a preacher of the present, 
or of the preceding generation preach from this 
text? I never did. I confess I never preached 
from it myself before. But if you will let me 
Use the word that Jesus used; I will try to 
preach from it in all faithfulness this morning; 
and, what is more, I expect to go on preaching 
from it till I die. 

If we really believe it; there is no text in the 
Bible which commands us that it should be 
preached as this one does, God says, " Son of 
man, when I say unto the wicked, Thou shalt 
surely die; and thou givest him not warning, 
nor speakest to warn the wicked from his wicked 
way to save his life ; the same wicked man shall 
die in his iniquity; but his blood will I require 
at thy hand." 

We wish no blood of souls upon our hands. 
All that deters many an earnest, faithful preacher 
of the gospel to-day from announcing this text 
is that he has no certain, frank, undoubted and 
undoubtable message to give men from it. He 
doesn't know what to say, he doesn't know what 
to think about it; so, perforce, he remains silent. 

79 



80 GOSPEL FOR BOTH WORLDS 

Our forefathers believed it, even in the literal- 
ness of its mistranslation; and preached it till 
the benches shook as men sat and trembled upon 
them. Then Christianity had power. Go into 
the villages and country places of our eastern 
states, and you will find old churches — great, 
barn-like structures, all one room inside, with 
pews close together and galleries around three 
sides. They were built in the days when men 
believed in hell. Everyone came to church then. 
Men were interested to know what might become 
of them in eternity. And they generally heard 
something pertinent to that subject* 

It is a subject somewhat avoided in the preach- 
ing of to-day — and men go to church occa- 
sionally, when there is some especial attraction. 
On this theme of eternity the modern gospel 
trumpet gives an uncertain sound. Our minis- 
try would be grieved to the heart to be accused 
of weakening the belief of men in immortality ; 
yet this is the inevitable result of any lack of defi- 
niteness and strong conviction in our preaching 
with regard to the eternal destiny of souls. The 
present life was never so alluring in the illusion 
of its nearer vista than it is to-day. It was 
never easier to forget eternity in the interests 
of time. Consequently, the world has never so 
greatly needed a message of flaming intensity 
and overwhelming reasonableness with regard to 
the future life. Just now, when the blare of the 
life that now is comes so continually upon our 



THE SACREDNESS OF HELL 81 

ears, is the time of all the ages when we most 
have needed a clarion note of appeal and of 
warning with regard to the life which is to come. 
To let our message on this theme which is really 
worth while sink, at this juncture, to an incoherent 
mumble, is to relax the one sure hold religion 
once had on the consciences of men. They do not 
readily take stock in dim uncertainties. " Let us 
live for to-day," they think ; " that, at least, is 
real. ' Take the cash, and let the credit go.' " 

It is the before and after that give life its 
dignity and meaning. Man's creation in the 
image of God; his destiny eternally to deal with 
God — these beliefs alone cast out what is brut- 
ish. When our preaching gets shaky about the 
creation and fall of man, and shady about his 
hereafter, we simply forestall the time when the 
auctioneer's notice will be tacked on the church 
door. An era of unspeakable graft and mean- 
ness coupled with a languid outward deference 
for Christianity is the natural result of vague 
teaching about heaven and hell. If we believe 
in eternal hopeless hell fire for those who have 
not made their peace with God in this world; 
in God's name let us preach it: how can we pos- 
sibly help preaching it, as our grandfathers did, 
every chance we get? If we have any modified 
doctrine of hell that seems reasonable; let us 
reason it out for all we are worth, before men 
lose their interest in the whole subject of Chris- 
tianity. 



82 GOSPEL FOR BOTH WORLDS 

Nominal Christian people do not realize whither 
they are drifting. The practical creed we live 
by, as distinguished from that which we nominally 
profess, is fast formulating into this: that 
pleasant things are pleasant. " Let us eat and 
drink; for to-morrow we die." At our best, 
there is pleasant home life, pleasant humaneness, 
pleasant social service (covering hideous social 
injustice), pleasant play at missions, pleasant mu- 
sic at funerals, some flowers and a tombstone — 
then it's all over. 

There was a time when the name of hell came 
from the gospel preacher's lips strident with 
warning, quivering with real emotion, majestic 
with forceful argument. To-day, it simply isn't 
heard at all. No, sir! hardly with ninety-nine 
preachers out of a hundred, or hardly from one 
year's end to another. The name is hardly found 
in polite literature of the period : it is considered 
out of place in conversation. It is low and coarse 
in its present day association. It is used, for the 
most part, in ribald joke or lurid profanity. 
Fools make a jest of hell. Blasphemers make it 
the bagatelle of their unintermittent oaths. So 
they do with the sacred name of God himself. 
But the name of hell is used only in this light or 
wicked way. Shall we let the old word go? 
Has it become too far debased? Has it been 
profaned and ridiculed past our earnest use? 
What other word have we for the thing? While 
men are jesting over it, hell itself is yawning 



THE SACREDNESS OF HELL 83 

beneath their feet. No, we must stand for the 
sacredness of hell, as we do for the sacredness of 
God. Make hell real to men, and they will stop 
joking soullessly about it. Show them the real 
hell, and oaths will die upon their lips. We are 
here this morning to stand for this thesis, that 
hell is the most sacred place in all God's universe; 
first, by reason of its tremendous reality; sec- 
ond, by reason of the use God is making of it. 

Hell is real. Look around you, if you doubt 
it. Look within. Sin is hell. Hate is hell. 
Envy is hell. Falsity is hell. Meanness is hell. 
Lust is hell. Selfish discontent is hell. Over- 
reaching your neighbor is hell. Cold-blooded in- 
difference is hell. Cruelty is hell — cruel stabs, 
cruel words, cruel silence, cruel pride, cruel supe- 
riority, cruel bargains, cruel tyranny, cruel mis- 
judgment, cruel suspicion. A bully is a bloated 
slice of hell. 

Drink is hell. Gambling, even to its most re- 
fined disguise, is hell. Domestic unfaithfulness 
is hell. Living any sort of a lie is hell. Hypoc- 
risy is hell. Doubt is hell. Bigotry is hell. 
Superstition is hell. 

Virtue is its own reward: vice is its own pen- 
alty; but God knows how to intensify both. 
Sins of the flesh bring infirmities to the body, 
premonitory of the pains of hell. Sins of the 
mind warp and darken and embitter. So we 
stumble into deeper sin. Sin's worst penalty is 
the plague-culture with which it infects the 



84 GOSPEL FOR BOTH WORLDS 

soul. It may be only a little whiter spot in the 
palm of a lily white hand that first shows the 
leprosy which will rot every fibre by and by. 

The soul that sinneth, it shall die. Oh! there 
are so many ways they take to die! The man 
with tuberculosis may have it in his lungs, his 
nasal tubes, or in the joints of his bones. Wher- 
ever it lurks, it is death within. Wherever sin 
lurks, there is death in the soul. 

Follow the unregenerated sinner into eternity. 
Grant us immortality — that is all. His hell is 
simply to go on being as he has been, only worse 
and worse. The cannon ball follows the aim of the 
gun. The sin-germ breeds its swarm in the soul. 
Always, everywhere, sin is soul-death. A young 
Southerner was bantering his old nurse about her 
beliefs. " Tell me, Auntie," he said, " where 
does the Lord get all the brimstone it will take 
for His lake of fire and brimstone? It must 
take a lot of brimstone for all the people in 
hell." " Law's, honey ! " was the ready answer, 
" yuh don' need to trouble yo'self to ansuh dat 
ah question. De Lawd don 5 hab no trouble 
gittin' de brimstone. Case you takes yo brim- 
stone wiv yuh." 

To doubt and deny hell would be a pleasing 
way to be rid of the fact ; if it would avail. Ev- 
ery pulse-beat of the sinner's conscience assures 
him that he is under condemnation ; and as sure 
as God is just he must exist until he has suffered 
for his sin. Hell must be punitive, as well as 



THE SACREDNESS OF HELL 85 

reformatory. Otherwise God's justice would 
rank below human justice. Jesus did not say, 
" These shall go away into aeonian discipline," 
merely ; but he said, " These shall go away into 
aeonian punishment." God will render to every 
man according to his works. Well might the 
drunken admirer of Ingersoll urge him on to 
disprove the existence of hell for the reason that 
if hell did exist a great many of his associates 
were plainly upon their way thither. Colonel 
Richardson used to tell a story which sounds 
rather as though it had been made or adapted 
to order; yet it may serve to point to truth. 
He and two Universalist friends were represented 
as arguing over the existence of a hell which 
his friends combatted as too horrible for belief. 
They were in a boat upon the Niagara river, and, 
absorbed in their dispute, did not realize their 
danger until they had drifted into the clutch of 
the rapids. The Universalists, so the story goes, 
began to cry to God for mercy, while the re- 
doubtable Colonel seized the oars, and by 
supreme exertions succeeded in bringing the boat 
safely to land. When he upbraided his friends 
with the inconsistency of pleading for mercy, 
since they had just been arguing that all men 
dying — good, bad, and indifferent — woke up 
sanctified in heaven; they were silent for some 
moments, until one confessed, " Universalism is 
a pleasant theme for which to argue ; but it won't 
do to go over Niagara upon." The plunge into 



86 GOSPEL FOR BOTH WORLDS 

eternity is not safely taken upon the flattering 
assurance that God will in any way relieve the 
unrepentant soul from the necessity of reaping 
what it has sown. Broken law means inevitable 
penalty, which either the sinner or his appro- 
priated Sin-bearer must make good. It means 
also inevitable chastening and discipline in time 
and in eternity, even for the penitent; and the 
great Bearer of sin and sorrow would not Him- 
self be willing to deprive anyone of its blessed 
ministry. Every sin demands its tear. Any- 
thing; so we are taught to let sin alone. 

Goethe says, " Nature understands no jesting." 
The laws of God are not in any way designed 
for trifling. Hell may be nearest to the one 
who scoffs at it. " Deacon, how far is it to 
hell? " demanded a half tipsy young man, mount- 
ing his horse at an inn door. The deacon reflected 
a moment and answered, " It is not far off. You 
may come to it sooner than you expect." His 
questioner spurred his horse forward, with a 
laugh. The deacon followed on his way to 
church; until at a turn of the road he found a 
circle of people standing around the rider's 
corpse. 

How far is it to hell? It is as far as the 
nearest grog-shop. It is as far as to some gilded 
temple of whore-worship which calls itself a 
theatre. It is as far as to the counter or ex- 
change where one drives an unfair bargain with 
his neighbor. It is as far as to the work bench 



THE SACREDNESS OF HELL 87 

where an employee bends to his unwilling toil with 
bitter envy and hatred in his heart. It is as 
far as to the home-circle from which love has 
flown. It is as far as to the pulpit where a 
preacher of the gospel stands to mumble con- 
ventional half -beliefs, or shrinks from denouncing 
sin. The hell around and within makes us ter- 
ribly sure of the hell below. 

Hell is sacred in its reality. Can we make a 
jest about death in the chamber of death? Hell 
may have its humorous associations, as every- 
thing real and human must have; but the humor 
of it is not for the damned. Sometimes pity is 
akin to laughter as well as to love. True laugh- 
ter softens the heart for pity. A hopeless hell 
would be a world's heartache too sad for any 
smile. Angels beholding it could smile no more. 
But a hell which does its grim work with a tender 
purpose and an overmastering hope may some- 
times bring out a smile of amusement through 
heaven's tears. Hell is sacred because it is so 
real; but it is far more sacred because it is pur- 
poseful. Its sorrow is the aching womb of re- 
demption's greatest joy. As sure as God's King- 
dom ruleth over all; He must be using hell for 
the working out of His most sacred purpose. A 
hospital is sacred; because gruesome operations 
are performed there by which men and women 
and children are taken apart and put together for 
new possibilities of physical existence. A peni- 
tentiary is sacred; because there criminals are 



88 GOSPEL FOR BOTH WORLDS 

given a chance to think on their ways in the 
silence, and to begin at honest industry. Many 
processes that are slow and painful are corre- 
spondingly beneficent. A convalescence may be 
too rapid for enduring results. The wound of 
the operation may need to be reopened again 
and again. Jesus says, " These shall go away 
into seonian punishment." God's gravest work 
takes aeons. What matter; if eternity lies still 
beyond? 

Men must be holden in cords of affliction; un- 
til God can show them their work, and open their 
ears to discipline. If it is true of earth; how 
much more of hell, that — 

" This strange, sad world is but our Father's 
school ! " 

It is obduracy and rebellion that make hell 
ages long. When we see even Christian men and 
women, who have every spiritual privilege and 
blessing lavished upon their life, still in their mor- 
bid spells nursing a feeling of dejection and sore- 
ness about some phase of their lot in life, toying 
with the insanity of gloom, and making little 
perceptible progress toward the heart's ease that 
comes with submission; we wonder how long hell 
will have to last to wear out the rage of an 
utterly rebellious spirit in the patient embrace of 
God's everlasting arms. Mere sorrow cannot 
help or save: wrongly taken, it may embitter and 
warp: but sorrow has often proved God's angel 



THE SACREDNESS OF HELL 89 

visitant sent to lead us humbly back to Christ. 
In the parable of Dives and Lazarus, we see that 
hell's affliction was already bringing Dives more 
earnest, and partly unselfish thoughts. A linger- 
ing illness has been a factor in many a one's con- 
version: what may we not hope from the reflec- 
tions of hell? The " Tophet " of the Old 
Testament and the " Gehenna of fire " (translated 
"hell fire") in the New refer primarily to a 
place in the valley of Hinnom where refuse was 
burned. This incinerating process in hell cannot 
destroy the immortal tissue of the soul itself: 
it can burn away only that which is evanescent 
and worthless. The very word, purity, speaks 
of the agency of fire. Thank God for hell fire, 
to burn dross out of souls ! Even hell itself — 

" Hath no sorrow 
That heaven can not heal." 

Many a man, to-day has reason to thank God 
for a term in jail. Why not also in hell's prison? 
What other possible all-compensating purpose 
could God have in keeping His hell? A South 
Sea islander asked his missionary, " Why don't 
God kill Satan, and stop the evil? " A pertinent 
question, indeed! And one to which the best 
possible answer should be that God means to 
make Satan himself loathe the evil by and by 
and help to repair it. If God should kill Satan, 
or merely hold him in check; He would thus be 
confessing that He had made a failure of Satan. 



90 GOSPEL FOR BOTH WORLDS 

If any created soul should utterly perish at last ; 
God's universe would thus prove itself a failure 
in that one detail. All the world would turn its 
back upon the pitiful black hole where that life 
became extinct, with a shuddering loss of faith 
in God. But once concede the possibility of 
salvation in hell, and its state becomes the most 
interesting in all the universe. All eyes are fo- 
cussed where the most thrilling rescue is being 
made. One word in Burns' immortal poem then 
becomes capable of an eager change: 

" But fare you well, auld Nickie-ben; 
O wad ye tak a thought an* men'; 
Ye aiblins might — I dinna ken — 
Still hae a stake. 

I'm thrilled to think upo' yon den, 
E'en for your sake." 

That which makes even hell most sacred in our 
thoughts is the conviction for which we are find- 
ing ground in these studies of God's word, that 
the gospel of salvation is to be preached there. 
Hell's discipline may be depended upon to pre- 
pare mellowed ground; but only the vital seed 
of redemption's power can stir new life in any 
soul there. Think of hell as a mission field, as 
a revival field! Introduce the element of the 
preaching of the gospel into its dark, dark prob- 
lems! I wonder that those who hitherto have 
mused upon the * larger hope ' seem to have 
never turned their thoughts upon this line of 



THE SACREDNESS OF HELL 91 

evangelism in hell. What else can there be to 
present even a ray of hope? Where else can 
there be found a branch of healing for hell's 
bitter waters? The emperor Tiberius Csesar was 
applied to by a prisoner to hasten the conclusion 
of his sentence of punishment; but he answered, 
" Stay, sir : you and I are not friends yet." A 
million aeons of teeth-gnashing in hell will not 
make any soul at one with God. There is only 
one way for that: "Being justified by faith, 
we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus 
Christ." But " faith cometh by hearing, and 
hearing by the word of God." Nothing else but 
this precious gospel will save on earth, through- 
out the universe, in hell. Oh, glorious gospel! 
bringing the offer of pardon to the guilty and 
self-condemned, bringing hope into the regions 
of despair, bringing the living Christ in its 
message of Him, He Himself, honoring His word 
in mighty power to save! Ionian punishment 
must yield to aeonian redemption ; else Christ were 
only the fraction of a saviour, and God's plan 
for His world only the fragment of a success. 
" These shall go away into aeonian punishment " ; 
go where Christ can deal with them for their rec- 
lamation, where they will grow hungry for the 
gospel message they slighted on earth, where 
Christ may reach them as there was not space 
to reach them all here, where the scales of preju- 
dice will fall from their eyes, where their poor, 
self-stopped ears will be opened to the truth, where 



92 GOSPEL FOR BOTH WORLDS 

the sweet uses of hell's adversity may prepare 
the way for the mellowed joy of penitence and 
pardon. There in the passing of the aeons curses 
will soften into sighs, and sighs into tears, and 
tears into prayer, as the knowledge of God's 
truth comes in; and prayer, even in hell, will 
bring the keenest joy of heaven. 

Friends think on hell. For two generations 
we have been conscientiously, timidly, weakly 
turning our thoughts away from the most sacred 
field of inquiry in God's universe. But with 
this mighty hope of redemption to come changing 
the light of all our sky, the thought of hell, with 
all its terrors undenied, grows tender and sacred. 
When your gaze shrinks from its dread realities, 
look into the face of your Saviour who died for 
all. He is able to save unto the uttermost of 
aeonian hell. Have you put your whole trust in 
Him for time and for eternity? Hell yawns be- 
neath you, unless you are safe in the arms of 
Jesus. After a Sunday evening meeting, a pas- 
tor of a former generation spoke to a moral and 
highly cultivated young woman, quoting " ' Ex- 
cept a man be born again, he cannot enter the 
kingdom of heaven.' And if not heaven," he 
said, " what then? There is but one other place, 
and that is hell." The young lady was trusting 
in her morality, and went away offended. That 
night she dreamed that the day of judgment had 
come, and saw the Saviour- judge seated upon the 
clouds. The words, " If not born again, not 



THE SACREDNESS OF HELL 93 

heaven; and if not heaven, hell," rang in her 
ears. She awoke in great terror, and began to 
call on God for mercy. 

Friends, we are talking together heart to heart 
this morning, not as the passing tenants of earth, 
but as the inhabitants of eternity. JEons and 
ages flow around us. Vast currents suck and 
draw. Heaven and hell pull at every heart-beat. 
Only in the heart of Christ are we secure. Oh, 
cling to Him, cling to Him now ! With the arm 
of His love and power about us, we can look out 
into the aeonian future. We can see life, life, 
life before us there. Best of all, we can see a 
mission. " There's a work for me and a work 
for you." Let us live for that! Let us get in 
training for it: let us grow skilled in the prac- 
tice of it: let us glory in the fulness of it: let 
us begin at it to-day. Eternity! eternity! not 
a blank background of misty nothingness, light 
above, dark below; but oh! a world of interest, 
teeming with variety, thrilling in its humanness, 
glorious in its pulsing of deathless hope! 

"Eternity! Eternity! 
That boundless, soundless, tideless sea, 
Of mysteries the mystery, 
What is eternity to me ? 

Infinite bliss or misery, 

Woe past, woe present, woe to be; 

The fulness of felicity; 

These are eternity to me. 



94 GOSPEL FOR BOTH WORLDS 

Two voices from eternity! 
A voice from heaven comes down to me, 
A voice from hell breaks dolefully, 
Life, death, O man ! are offered thee. 

The abyss is moved ; even wrath cries, ' Flee/ 
The height expands, and love cries, ' See 
What God hath here prepared for thee; 
Choose thou thine own eternity ! * " 

Choose you this day whom ye will serve. Our 
service is for the aeons. There is no discharge 
in that war, only asonian victory. iEonian life 
means aeonian struggle for God. Age-lasting, 
all-satisfying! Oh, give yourself to Christ and 
to His service now! Choose what shall be His 
word to you as you enter eternity, as you stand 
before Him in the judgment. Shall it be, 
" Come ye blessed, 55 or shall it be, " Depart ye 
cursed 55 ? Shall it be inheriting the kingdom 
which must conquer all ; or shall it be sharing the 
age-lasting, seonian fire prepared for the devil 
and his angels? This is a sacred moment for 
us: sacred for its outlook upon heaven and hell, 
* sacred for its opportunity to choose for eternity, 
sacred for its vow and prayer which each heart 
can hear the other whisper to the listening heart 
of Christ that we may be His forever more. 



VIII 
FIRST-FRUITS OF THE HARVEST 

" Every good gift and every perfect gift is from above, 
and cometh down from the Father of lights, with whom 
is no variableness, neither shadow of turning. Of his own 
will begat he us with the word of truth, that we should 
be a kind of first fruits of his creatures." — James i, 18. 

It is thrilling to remember how small a circle 
James was addressing when he wrote this keen 
letter to Christian believers among the Jews of 
the Dispersion, making this sweeping claim for 
them that, few as they were, they constituted the 
first-fruits of an infinite harvest — even of God's 
whole intelligent creation. The first-fruits rep- 
resent the harvest: they also give the promise of 
the harvest. Here were a few thousand believers 
in Christ widely scattered through the roaring hea- 
then world which was indifferent, hostile, darkly 
prejudiced, intolerant, almost utterly irrational, 
and seemingly beyond all persuasion. The odds 
were a thousand to one that the new faith would 
be choked, annihilated, trodden under foot in its 
birth. Yet the apostle looking abroad upon this 
thin dotting of Jewish believers upon the vast 
map of humanity, dares to call them a kind of 
first-fruits of God's creatures. That was because 
he believed with the vision of inspiration in the 
unswerving purpose of God, in whom there is no 
variableness, neither shadow of turning. He who, 

95 



96 GOSPEL FOR BOTH WORLDS 

of His own infinite will had begotten the first- 
fruits could and would also beget all the others 
to form his complete soul-flock, soul-harvest. 
The miracle of one soul born again leaves the 
new birth of all the others an easy matter of 
detail. 

The -firstling represents the flock, the first- 
fruits represent the harvest. It was because Je- 
hovah's rightful claim extended to all a man's 
increase, that he was to make his acknowledg- 
ment of this rightful claim by honoring God 
with the first-fruits of all his increase. Paul 
says, " If the first-fruits are holy ; the lump also 
is holy." The first sheaf of the harvest, the first 
spring lamb of the flock, also the first-born of 
his household were sacred to Jehovah; simply 
because these stood for all the others. So God's 
first-born Son stood for us all in the infinite 
sacrifice of Calvary. And so these early Jewish 
Christians to whom James wrote, the first converts 
to Christ both at Jerusalem and in each city of 
the outer world — because the gospel in each was 
first proclaimed in the synagogue — these as a 
sort of first-fruits of God's great coming family 
of believers in Jesus, represented and stood for 
all the others. They were doubly sacred and 
precious because they were so few. The experts 
of our agricultural department in their develop- 
ment of a new variety of wheat of larger grains 
and heavier heads, or one capable of ripening 
during a short northern summer, will first pro- 



FIRST-FRUITS OF THE HARVEST 97 

duce a few grains, or a cup full. Every gi*ain 
of this seed is worth many times its weight in 
gold. Years of thought and care and outlay have 
gone into producing it. The waving harvests 
of the future are bound up in it. So with the 
prize tulip, the latest perfection of carnation. 
Thousands of dollars are required to buy them: 
they are first-fruits, and they are precious. 

The -first-fruits also give the promise of the 
harvest. The same sunshine which has ripened the 
earliest yellowing ear will ripen the million others. 
The weak birth-cry of the first little lamb of 
spring tells of the Heatings of the doubled flock 
a few weeks later. It sounds the clarion of 
fecundity. So Eve's first baby came as the first 
tiny drop of that infinite stream of human lives 
which has flowed through this world of ours. 
When the Israelites came into their promised land, 
when they had conquered it and laid aside their 
weapons and plowed and sowed, and were about 
to reap their first harvest, they were to bring 
each the first-fruits of his first crop, the first 
cluster of his first vintage, as especially holy to 
Jehovah. This was all carefully enjoined upon 
them through Moses away back in the wilderness. 
The reason was that their first harvest and vin- 
tage and fruit-gathering in Canaan was to be 
Jehovah's sure promise to them of fruitful years 
and centuries to come. 

And now when James dares to call these souls 
early won to Christ a sort of first-fruits of God's 



98 GOSPEL FOR BOTH WORLDS 

creatures, how else can we interpret the plain 
meaning of his figure of speech but that these 
first newborn souls not only represented; but also 
gave the promise of the complete and universal 
ingathering of all God's created souls? What 
else can his words mean? If all are not to be 
gathered in; how could these be called, without 
limitation, the first-fruits of God's creatures ? He 
would have called them simply the first-fruits of 
God's increase, the first-fruits of those whom God 
had predestinated to be gathered in, the first- 
fruits of God's limited harvest. But he sweeps 
away all these narrower forecasts, and calls them 
simply a first-fruits of God's created beings. If 
he meant anything less than universal ultimate 
salvation ; then his language, to say the least of 
it, is misleading. 

When Paul calls the risen Christ the first-fruits 
of them that slept, he meant it as inclusive for 
all. He mentions especially in the context those 
that are Christ's who will live with their risen 
Lord; but also teaches that all are to live again 
and receive according to the deeds done in the 
body. " As in Adam all die ; so in Christ shall all 
be made alive." Undoubtedly this applies to death 
of body and soul. It promises both immortality 
and reclamation for all. In Adam all became mor- 
tal and sinful. Sin came, and death by sin, and 
reigned over all. God had on His hands a world 
full of dying, perishing souls ; for the soul that 
sinneth, it must die. The offence came by one, 



FIRST-FRUITS OF THE HARVEST 99 

the free gift of eternal life by One. Christ is 
not only the first-fruits of resurrection, but the 
fountain head of salvation, and as by the offence 
of all many were made sinners ; so by the obedience 
of One (even unto death) many — the same and 
equal many — shall be made righteous. When 
Christ triumphed over the grave, He led captivity 
captive, and brought the precious twin gifts of 
immortality and salvation to men. They are for 
all ; because all will yet accept them. He died in 
the place of all; that they which live (through 
Him) should not henceforth live unto themselves, 
but unto Him who in their place died and rose 
again. It was His irresistible intention that all 
should do so. They are His rightful guerdon: 
nothing less will satisfy and repay Him; He has 
poured out His soul unto death, and must see 
His seed from first-born to the last dying soul 
reborn: He must reap His whole harvest from 
first-fruits to cap-sheaf of all. 

Men who deal in ' futures ' buy crops while 
they are still growing. When Christ poured out 
His precious blood on Calvary, He bought the 
whole harvest of the universe of souls, and He 
will claim His own. Using the other figure of 
the flock He declares, " Other sheep I have, which 
are not of this fold: them also, I must bring, 
and they shall hear my voice and there shall be 
one fold and one shepherd." Satan's robber fold 
must be emptied; that the Good Shepherd's fold 
may be the only one at last. 



100 GOSPEL FOR BOTH WORLDS 

Harvest days are often the longest days of the 
year. God's harvest day of souls is age-lasting. 
Aye, give Him time! What a harvest has been 
gathered since James recognized the first-fruits! 
What has been gathered for God from the fields 
of time only proves the harvest sure from the 
fields of eternity. Suppose the gospel had been 
carried to China in its purity and power one thou- 
sand years ago. Humanly speaking, any one of 
our mission boards could figure out the proba- 
bilities of millions upon millions who would have 
thus been won for Christ in this world, and who 
should by every deduction and induction of sane 
reasoning be just as amenable, or even more 
amenable to influence toward Christ in the 
spirit world to which they have flitted with- 
out the precious knowledge of their Saviour. 
God pity us for letting them die in their ig- 
norance and sin: God nerve us for the inev- 
itable reparation of tenfold more eager seek- 
ing for their lost souls in hell ! The harvest lost 
here must be reaped hereafter. God will not be 
balked of His harvest. The fact that this har- 
vesting work for God could have been done so 
easily, should have been done, wasn't done, only 
proves that it will be done — easy or hard — 
hereafter. Every century lost only makes the 
harvest haste more pressing. 

But you say Jesus speaks of a harvest at the 
end of the world (better, at the end of the aeon) 
in which souls that are tares shall be bound in 



FIRST-FRUITS OF THE HARVEST 101 

bundles to be burned. So they will be destroyed 
with unquenchable fire, and that will be the end of 
them. If it is the end of them ; then a good many 
exceeding great and precious promises of God's 
Word that cannot lie will have come to noth- 
ing. After judgment comes salvation. It is so 
in this world. He that believeth not is condemned 
already. When he comes to believe on the name 
of the only-begotten Son of God, he is saved : the 
condemnation is all taken away. That is so here, 
and hereafter. Always, everywhere, whosoever 
will may come. There are three harvests: the 
harvest of death, the harvest of judgment, the 
harvest of salvation. James clearly suggests that 
this last harvest will be complete. And we read in 
Revelation how after the Lamb stood on the 
Mount Sion, and with Him the hundred and forty 
and four thousand sealed ones, twelve thousand 
from each of the symbolic twelve tribes of Israel, 
and besides these came the voice of multitudes, as 
the voice of many waters, and as the voice of a 
great thunder, the voice of harpers harping with 
their harps; after these redeemed ones from 
among men are recognized in the vision as the 
first-fruits unto God and to the Lamb ; then, after 
all this, John saw another angel fly in the midst 
of heaven having the everlasting gospel to pro- 
claim to all. When heaven's harvest of salvation 
has all been gathered in from earth, these will 
still be only the first-fruits of universal, aeonian 
salvation. Oh, the prophetic joy of the full har- 



102 GOSPEL FOR BOTH WORLDS 

vest when the first-fruits are gathered in ! In the 
orient to this day when travelers are passing 
along some highway past a field of grain yellow- 
ing to the sickle, they may see a husbandman look- 
ing over his field, see him pick a head of wheat 
or two somewhat riper than the rest and behold 
him running to meet them with every demonstra- 
tion of joy, leaping and gesticulating until he 
comes, to show them his first-fruits as a trophy 
of the reward of patient labor yet to be harvested. 
So Judson after six years of incredible patience 
of toil and suffering in Burmah rejoiced over 
his first soul won to Christ, the first-fruits of what 
now counts up into the millions of glorious soul 
harvest. 

Aye, give God time: the reaping is too great 
for the little average lifetime of ephemeral mor- 
tals here on earth. It is too great for the little 
fleeting years and centuries of hurried history on 
this planet. Its fields are wider than earth. Its 
harvest day is more lasting than time. Its la- 
borers are few here ; but they are many yonder. 

God's harvest truly is plenteous. With what 
different feelings now will we bend to it as la- 
borers in his harvest! If you came in here this 
morning an enthusiastic worker for God, I expect 
you to go out tenfold more eager, and confident, 
and enthusiastic. It is such a long harvest, such 
a vast harvest, such a sure harvest! How else 
could you have any heart or hope in it; if you 
didn't believe that? There was a time when I 



FIRST-FRUITS OF THE HARVEST 103 

tried to approach men for God ; but I did it fur- 
tively and with a failing heart. I looked into 
each man's eyes to see if I could see there a gleam 
of inward light, a capability of laying hold on 
God and heaven; yet dreading to find there a 
soul's face set toward hell. I wondered of each 
which would prove true wheat in God's great 
granary, and which would be only chaff for the 
winds of perdition to drive away, away. I did 
try to save men, and rejoiced in one and another 
drawn from the stream which was so obviously 
setting away from God. But the opportunity 
for rescue work seemed so brief, the stream of 
drifting lives so wide, so swift, so resistless in its 
flow! Men were so much more prone to believe 
a lie than to believe the truth. They were so 
resentful of good influence, so flexible to evil 
influence, here to-day, gone to-morrow, frail, fleet- 
ing; yet determined never to admit their own 
mortality, to think on their end, to turn and not 
die. I stood in God's harvest field nerveless at 
the hopeless hugeness of its task, grieved to the 
heart over its millionfold waste of lives, nervous 
over lost opportunities of soul-winning, and para- 
lyzed in the dread of making blunders worse than 
negligence in their effect upon the eternal fate of 
souls. But to-day I look upon each man or 
woman as a part of God's great sheaf and God's 
sure harvest. Somewhere, somehow each will be 
bound in the bundle of life at last. If I try and 
fail of saving him, some one else, under God, will 



104 GOSPEL FOR BOTH WORLDS 

surely try and succeed. I have no responsibility 
but to keep cheerily on trying by all means to 
save some. By God's help, I am in this line for 
some ages to come; and I cannot afford to be 
despondent or hysterical about it. I cannot do 
my best at it, except with a bounding heart. 
Thank God! my heart has reason to bound and 
to exult. If I could find any reason to believe 
that the comparatively meager results to be 
achieved in this life were all the harvest; I would 
grow sick with the discouragement. The scythe 
of death works faster than our evangelistic sickle. 
But oh ! the true harvest is not death's but God's. 
Sometimes in the pressure of harvesting haste 
part of the work is done by moonlight. The hus- 
bandmen begin at midnight, or work until mid- 
night, by the light of the harvest moon. Friends I 
God's moonlight soul-harvesting is done here on 
earth. We grope somewhat, and gather the 
precious sheaves as best we may. But death will 
bring the sunrise of God's aeonian harvest day. 
Then we will see as we are seen, and know as we 
are known, and meet heart to heart the loved 
ones we have failed to win to Jesus here. No 
restrictions of the flesh will hamper us: it will 
be harvest time ; tireless, sleepless, eager, glorious, 
till the last sheaf is gathered in. 

"He that goeth forth and weepeth, bearing 
precious seed, shall doubtless come again with re- 
joicing, bringing his sheaves with him." Get 
your sheaves for God, brother, sister, where and 



FIRST-FRUITS OF THE HARVEST 105 

when you may. It is God's greatest work for us 
in any world. Up from the harvest fields of 
earth, up from the harvest fields of hell, — 

"We will come rejoicing, 
Bringing in the sheaves." 

Let us fill our arms with sheaves here, gleaning 
the handf uls where we may. We would come up 
at last to the threshold of heaven's safe granary, 
not empty handed, having no sheaves to lay at 
Jesus' nail-pierced feet ; but with full hearts, full 
arms, tired, but oh! so happy, bringing our 
sheaves with us. However, let us not imagine 
that this much will content us for eternity. 
These will be only the first-fruits: the harvest, 
in its completeness, will be still before us. Re- 
newed in strength and energy, invigorated with 
immortality, we will bend to the ripening grain 
of God's infinite world-field. Filling heaven will 
be our dearest heaven. Without haste, without 
rest; out into the highways, out into the byways 
— out upon perdition's hottest harvest field ; then 
back again with precious sheaves to shout the 
glory of heaven's eternal harvest home. Oh, the 
song of the reaper! oh, the joy of the saved 
ones! No soul to blast and rot forever! but 
sheaves, precious sheaves, each soul worth a uni- 
verse, won with toil, won with difficulty, won by 
battling for them, but won by faith in the mighty 
will of God, who begat us and will of His own 
resistless will beget each dead soul into new life; 



106 GOSPEL FOR BOTH WORLDS 

until the first fruits of His creatures prove their 
promise of the universal harvest. 

Is there one soul here which has not yet yielded 
itself into the arms of Jesus? Yield yourself to 
Him to-day, as you face eternity. He will not 
give you up ; we will not give you up ; sooner or 
later you will choose Christ and heaven. Every 
day's delay makes your case more difficult (not 
impossible) for Him, more difficult for His work- 
ers, more tedious for yourself. God help you, 
dear one, give yourself to Jesus now; be part of 
the first-fruits ; get to work to bring others ; have 
your rightful share in the glory of the harvest. 



IX 

THE GREAT COMMISSION 

"And he said unto them, Go ye into all the world, and 
preach the gospel to every creature: and lo! I am with 
you alway, even unto the end of the world." — Mark xvi, 
15; Matt, xxviii, 20. 

This composite text, familiarly quoted, has 
been very often called the Great Commission. 
There is nothing in the least degree original in 
my thus announcing the subject of my text; only 
I wonder how many of the hundreds of thousands 
who have preached upon it may have realized how 
great the commission is, or how lasting its prom- 
ise. In giving this commission and promise our 
Lord uses the very biggest words He could find 
in human language. He does not use the word, 
olKovpevq, i inhabited earth ' ; but He says " Go 
ye into all the Kosmos, and preach the gospel to 
every created being." It is true that in His 
whole utterance at this time He tells the disciples 
to go and teach all nations, baptizing them in the 
triune, equal Names. The commission to mortal 
men was primarily to evangelize this earth. I 
would be the last to deny that. He also said, 
" He that believeth and is baptized shall be 
saved ; but he that believeth not shall be damned." 
Christ does not say for how long the unbeliever 
shall be " damned " or condemned. He doesn't 
say it here, and He doesn't say it anywhere else. 

107 



108 GOSPEL FOR BOTH WORLDS 

And the promise attached to the commission 
reads clearly in the Greek, " Lo, I am with you 
alway, even unto the consummation of the age." 
What age? what seon? Why the age or aeon of 
evangelism, of course; and Jesus intimates that 
that is " alway." 

Let me, then, put forward the thesis that we 
have in this text a universal commission, coupled 
with an age-lasting promise. 

The commission is universal : " Go ye into all 
the universe, and preach the gospel to every cre- 
ated being." It has been fitly inferred that we 
have enfolded in this text a claim to the univer- 
sality of Christianity and its fitness to all. 
When Bishop Thoburn went to India, he was en- 
couraged by the comment, " You might as well 
try to make a Christian out of that pillar as out 
of the natives here." At the end of 40 years, 
300,000 Christian converts could be counted in 
India. The Gospel of Jesus Christ has proven 
itself as well adapted to the Hindoo as to any of 
his Aryan cousins or Brahmanical, Buddhistic, or 
Mahomedan co-religionists. It suits every race 
and every mental temperament. It meets the 
need of the groping, sin-burdened soul from 
Madagascar to Labrador, from Alaska back 
around to Japan. None but the most ignorant 
would quibble any longer upon that point. In 
the course of generations, some things get proved. 

If all men here; why not all men hereafter; 
why not all intelligent beings everywhere — 



THE GREAT COMMISSION 109 

Martians or demons? All come literally within 
the scope of the commission — preach the gospel 
to every created being. A clergyman asked the 
Duke of Wellington, for information, if he really 
thought the gospel could profitably be carried 
to the heathen. " Look to your marching orders, 
sir," was the characteristic reply : " ' Go ye into 
all the world, and preach the gospel to every 
creature.' " Perhaps the time has come for us 
to look again to our marching orders, that we 
may be encouraged by a wider view of our in- 
tended campaign. A mission to hell? You 
shrink in horror from the thought. But wait; 
an artillery officer had his men endeavoring to 
drag their guns to a certain hill-top. The 
wheels stuck: they strained in vain and cried, 
" Captain, it can't be done ! " " Men, it can ! " 
was the reply : " I have the order in my pocket." 
There can be no stronger argument when om- 
niscience has given an order, or commission. Let 
us look again this morning and see what commis- 
sion this great missionary Church of our Lord 
Jesus Christ has, perhaps unconsciously, in its 
pocket. Paul, in the doxology following his 
finest prayer exclaims, " Now unto him that is 
able to do exceeding abundantly above all that 
we ask or think, according to the power that 
worketh in us, unto him be glory in the church 
by Christ Jesus throughout all ages, unto the 
ages of ages, amen." The church has a mission 
of some sort for the ages of the ages yet to come, 



110 GOSPEL FOR BOTH WORLDS 

and omnipotence stands back of that mission and 
commission. 

So far as I know, I am alone in advancing as 
a theological tenet a belief in evangelism in 
hell. If I haven't scripture for it; what do the 
words of our text mean? Our Lord might so 
easily have given us a qualified commission; but 
this has not one limitation. It is universal, and 
it is without exception. On the face of it, it 
takes in the humblest, the lowest, the most igno- 
rant, the most animal, the most demoniacal. It 
takes in earth and hell. It declares none of 
God's created beings hopeless. It points the un- 
erring finger for you and me, when we are 
through with the mission fields of earth, and or- 
ders, " Go, go ! " — down there — and save ! " 

Our Lord Himself has set the example of 
evangelism in hell. He doesn't ask you or me 
to go where He hasn't gone Himself, where Paul 
and Peter and the Apostles' Creed agree that He 
has gone, where He hasn't been, from the begin- 
ning in His essential character of a Saviour as 
well as of a judge, where He will not go with us 
and be with us alway even unto the consumma- 
tion of hell's a3on and to the winding up of its ex- 
istence. What possibly could be a more reason- 
able thing for Jesus to do than to evangelize hell? 
Where could He find more souls to save? Where 
could there be manifested more gloriously His 
infinite power to save? 

The terrestrial mission field needs the infernal 



THE GREAT COMMISSION 111 

mission field to complete its conquests. The 
work begun on earth must be finished — if fin- 
ished anywhere — finished in hell. We grasp 
at drowning souls here, and save a comparative 
few. Hell is the resuscitation ground of 
drowned souls. If this is not true ; then the vast 
majority of our race have been hopelessly 
doomed. Under the eye and hand of an all-fore- 
seeing, omnipotent God, who alone decrees, and 
plans, and brings to pass whatsoever comes to 
pass, a million to one of His creatures have been 
created to be forever damned. Can you believe 
it? Then, there is no other alternative but to 
look forward to salvation in hell. God has 
elected some to be saved from hell, and the re- 
mainder to be saved out of hell; and in it all 
His infinite wisdom and love will be vindicated 
in the end. All's well that ends well. All can- 
not be well ; if part ends ill. Ask any one of our 
foreign missionaries who has stood amid the 
blight and ruin of paganism, and strained to 
heave a tiny section of its awful lethargy an 
inch nearer to the truth in Christ Jesus — ask 
what it has been which has nerved him for the 
supreme endurance of his mighty task. If he 
is of the more outspoken type, he will tell you 
it is the hope that somewhere, somehow, those 
millions dying around him in that far, dark land 
without a conscious knowledge of their only 
Saviour, may yet have a chance truly to know 
Him whom to know is life eternal. He will say, 



112 GOSPEL FOR BOTH WORLDS 

" If I didn't believe this ; I couldn't stand what I 
have seen." 

We can give our lives to missions ; we can pour 
our millions into missions; if you will only give 
us breath of hope. If in Siam, or Persia, or 
New England, or any land of most obdurate mis- 
belief, or unbelief, we could part the veil of 
obscurity that hides the future and know defi- 
nitely that the cause of God's truth, the rose of 
Sharon, was destined to wither and die there; 
that some day the last discouraged herald of the 
gospel would have to be recalled, and the in- 
habitants left to their insensate paganism ; would 
not the hearts of workers there faint and fail at 
the prospect, would not contributions and lega- 
cies fail of flowing in that direction, would not 
bright, intelligent young lives cease to be offered 
for that field? All that keeps the whole cause 
of missions alive for an hour is the hope of ulti- 
mate world-conquest. Thank God! we are en- 
couraged by His inerrant word, we are en- 
couraged by the ground already gained against 
infinite odds to believe that His work will go on. 
But what after all is the true mission of mis- 
sions? Is it to spread the name of Christendom 
over the map? Is it not rather and supremely 
to save perishing immortal souls? Each soul 
lost is a failure that never can be repaired on 
earth, a regret that no success with others can 
remove. If missions for this world were all, and 
were to become completely successful; still we 



THE GREAT COMMISSION 113 

would have a redeemed humanity standing broken 
hearted, wringing its hands above the corpse of 
a slaughtered race. The work of missions 
would be done, and yet forever, hopelessly not 
done and never to be done. The universe would 
be saddened by an eternal regret. Hell would 
still be triumphant ; heaven would be in tears. 

Friends! we are not giving our lives, our 
prayers, our treasures to a doomed cause like that. 
Our divine commission is not such a mockery. 
Glory to God! the work begun here, will go on 
and on. You say the commission itself contains 
a limitation. " He that believeth and is bap- 
tized shall be saved, but he that believeth not 
shall be damned." Yes, that is true here as well 
as hereafter. He that believeth not is con- 
demned already. In the Greek it is the same 
word. Our cry is not, " Believe, or be damned." 
Our cry is, " Believe ; for you are damned." 
Without Christ, you are already lost in sin. 
Now, that is a cry that suits hell. "Believe! 
for you are damned." And Christ is the only 
Saviour of those who are lost, who are damned. 
They are damned because they do not believe; 
but more universally true than that, they are 
damned until they do believe. Always every- 
where repentance and faith end condemnation. 
The worst damnation of all is a damnation into 
unbelief. When God sends men strong delusion, 
that they should believe a lie! There are mil- 
lions in this world and in the lower world who 



114 GOSPEL FOR BOTH WORLDS 

would rather believe a He, than believe the truth. 
Any old lie ! Mohammedanism, Romanism, Mor- 
monism, Spiritualism, Agnosticism, Christian 
Science, New Thought, Theosophy — anything, 
so it is palpably not the truth ! Hell itself could 
hardly be more besotted with fads, than this 
second decade of the Twentieth Century. But 
oh, thank God! there is something more lasting 
than fads. Back again, after its snake dance 
with poisonous error, comes poor, stricken, heart- 
weary, unsatisfied humanity to the One who alone 
can say, " I am the way, the truth, and the life." 
No soul can stay damned; for no soul can bear 
forever its unremitting loneliness for the Christ, 
its unappeasable homesickness for heaven. 
" Thou hast made our hearts after Thee," Augus- 
tine exclaims ; " and they never rest until they rest 
in Thee." 

Nothing could be more hopeful than our en- 
deavor. The innermost yearning of every 
created being is with it. Even Satan's heart is 
pining for it. The most insensate madman of 
superstition, and doubt, and sin in all God's uni- 
verse some day will give over torturing hims-elf 
to hold out longer against love. 

He that believeth and is baptized — with water 
and the spirit here, with the same quickening 
spirit hereafter — shall be saved. Those who 
do not find space for repentance on earth ; though 
they seek it carefully and with tears, as they 
grope from one misconception of God to an- 



THE GREAT COMMISSION 115 

other; will surely seek and find it hereafter. 
They stray ; but " toward a star." 

Does it not give the gospel a new power for 
you, dear unconverted friend, to realize that it 
is for every creature? Perhaps you have been 
kept from accepting it, as yet; because you have 
regarded it as a somewhat narrow and limited 
offer, a sort of snap proposition, the very 
brevity of whose chance made you hesitate and 
turn suspicious. This morning the gospel ap- 
peal comes to you; if the truth is with us; as 
an eternally standing offer, yet coupled with 
solemn warning of danger and loss in delaying 
to accept it. He that believeth not shall be 
damned. Will you accept it to-day under this 
bright blue sky of earth, or do you prefer to 
wait and have the offer seek you out, ages hence, 
among the dark and gloomy caverns of the 
damned? If you accept the gospel now; you 
can have an honorable part to perform under its 
commission. Perhaps you feel that you cannot 
do much to aid the cause of the gospel in what 
remains to you of hurried, toilsome earthly life ; 
but, friends, we will have eternity for the work 
of the gospel. What we can do for Christ and 
the gospel here, is little more than training for 
the wider, freer work beyond. This world is 
God's vineyard, but His training vineyard 
mainly. The eleventh hour men may each well re- 
ceive his day's wage, which is mainly, after all, 
the reward of living on to work unhampered for 



116 GOSPEL FOR BOTH WORLDS 

God in the boundless vintage of eternity. The 
victor in Spartan games had this for his most 
glorious distinction and reward, that he was 
privileged to stand in the forefront of future 
battles for his country. Promotion is the su- 
preme reward — to be foreman where you were 
laborer ; to take charge of a department in which 
you were a clerk; to be called to a larger pas- 
torate, with graver responsibilities, multiplied op- 
portunities of service; from police-commissioner 
to governor, vice-president, president. So it 
is in heaven. He that has been faithful in a 
few things shall be made ruler over many things. 
The man who gained two talents for his master 
shall have two cities to care for. The faithful 
worker in church or mission shall have a wider 
mission to lost souls beyond. I said the mis- 
sion field of earth needs the mission field of hell 
to complete its conquests. I can also claim that 
this infernal mission field is needed to employ 
the trained faculties of earth's workers. The 
man whose health has failed under a foreign 
climate, and all his remaining life here must be 
a wistf ulness for the glorious service interrupted ; 
the man who has met quick martyrdom in Christ's 
service, either by disease or violent death; these 
shall not go to spend eternity in an unavailing 
sigh for the usefulness they have missed here; 
but when they are called up higher they will 
find promotion to a work so wide and sweet and 
glad for God, that earth's retrospect will have 



THE GREAT COMMISSION 117 

in it no unavailing regret. They will have souls 
for their hire: souls to win in eternity. I am 
thinking of a friend who helped me in boyhood 
as only a young man can help a boy. He would 
gladly have been a minister of the gospel; only 
his eyes gave out from love of study. Sand- 
ford, old friend, you will be a preacher in glory. 
We will all be preachers there. Heaven has no 
laity, as Christ's church here rightfully has no 
laity; and there we shall sing our praises unto 
Him that loved us, and washed us from our sins 
in His own blood, who was slain and has re- 
deemed us to God by His blood out of every 
kindred, and tongue, and people, and nation ; and 
hath made us kings and priests unto God and 
His Father; that we may be priests of God and 
of Christ a thousand years ; unto whom be glory 
and dominion forever and ever. A mission to 
hell? Heaven will be aching for it, tingling for 
it, exulting in it; until, one by one, its vast re- 
vival field shall have yielded up its precious, 
priceless, penitents; and the joy-bells of heaven 
ring their final peal over the last hard heart of 
hell in tears. 

And going out upon this glorious aeonian mis- 
sion quest of souls, we have the promise of such 
companionship as will make heaven for us any- 
where. " Go ye into all the kosmos," He com- 
mands, " and preach the gospel to every created 
being; and lo, I am with you all the days even 
unto the synteleia, the winding up together of the 



118 GOSPEL FOR BOTH WORLDS 

age. All lines and curves in the history of this 
universe converge — some of them from almost 
infinite distances — toward a far-off focus, a con- 
summation, a synteleia. This is the one far-off, 
divine event toward which the whole creation 
moves. Not only do the planets of our solar 
system circle each in its ellipse around the sun; 
but the sun itself, with its whole system of worlds, 
circles onward, together with other suns and all 
their unseen worlds, around some center which 
our finite figuring cannot locate. 

" We sleep, we wake, we sleep ; but all things move ; 
The sun flies forward to his brother sun, 
The round earth follows, wheeled in her ellipse, 
And human things, returning on themselves, 
Move onward, leading up the golden year," 

The shadows of earth's sunsets point toward 
the sun-rise. As sure as facts cannot lie, a mil- 
lion prophetic fingers point our progress for- 
ward toward the synteleia. There will be a 
restoration of all things. " The whole creation 
groaneth and travaileth in pain together until 
now, waiting for the adoption, the redemption." 

You and I have our part in the synteleia. 
Out of the poor little blundering half -failures of 
our little lives God is summing up the splendid 
total of His perfect success. Every day we are 
building better than we know; for there is a 
Master Builder with us suggesting the details; 



THE GREAT COMMISSION 119 

but He alone knows the whole plan. Worker for 
God, what is it makes your heart kindle with a 
sudden happiness when you have overcome em- 
barrassment and false tact to speak out bravely 
for your Master? What is it that brings the 
little burst of song in your heart, as you come 
from the house of mourning where you have wept 
with those that weep? What is it makes life 
seem so rich as you walk home tired after put- 
ting your whole heart and brain into teaching 
your Sabbath school class? Why, it is just 
Jesus keeping his promise ! It is the " go " fol- 
lowed by the " lo " ! " Lo, I am with you all the 
days." The expression is Hebraic, thinly veiled 
in Greek words. It takes us back in memory to 
Moses, shrinking at the thought of standing be- 
fore Pharaoh to demand the release of the cap- 
tives, and God answering him out of the fiery 
bush, " Certainly, I will be with thee." It takes 
us back to Jehovah's encouragement of Joshua. 
" As I was with Moses, I will be with thee : I 
will not fail thee, nor forsake thee. Be strong 
and of good courage." It is a promise which 
takes in moment by moment. It is a promise 
which has availed through all the days of earth's 
history for millions who have trusted in it. In 
cities of heathenism, in opposing synagogues, in 
noisome prisons, in the arena of martyrdom, in 
leper cells, before judgment seats, the Inquisition, 
on the rack, in the galleys, upon grim battlefields, 
in pathless woods of banishment, how the glorious 



120 GOSPEL FOR BOTH WORLDS 

promise has been fulfilled to each — " I will never 
leave thee nor forsake thee." 

" Lo, I am with you all the days " : it is our 
Saviour's promise, unconditioned by time or 
space, conditioned only by our willingness to go 
where He sends us. In it is wrapped His tacit 
claim to divine omnipresence. He could not have 
made such a promise, if He had not been God. 
Christ is everywhere always. So long as we are 
moving under His great commission to preach 
His gospel, He will be with us in Worcester, in 
China, or in hell. All the days, all the years, 
all the seons. Is not that enough for us? 

Anywhere with Jesus I can safely go, 
Anywhere He leads me in the world below. 
Anywhere, without Him, dearest joys would fade: 
Anywhere with Jesus I am not afraid. 

Anywhere! anywhere! Fear I cannot know. 
Anywhere with Jesus I can safely go. 

Anywhere with Jesus I am not alone; 

While hell's skies are darkening, He is still my 

own. 
Though His hand may lead me through perdition's 

ways; 
Anywhere with Jesus is a house of praise. 

Anywhere that Jesus has His souls to win, 
Precious souls to rescue from the doom of sin, 
Heaven will be round me, wheresoe'er I roam. 
Anywhere with Jesus will be home, sweet home. 



THE COMPLETED CHORUS 

" And they sung a new song, saying, Thou art worthy 
to take the book and to open the seals thereof: for thou 
wast slain, and hast redeemed us to God out of every 
kindred, and tongue, and people, and nation. And every 
creature which is in heaven, and on the earth, and under 
the earth, and such as are in the sea, and all that are in 
them heard I saying, Blessing, and honor, and glory, and 
power be unto him that sitteth upon the throne, and unto 
the Lamb forever and ever." — Revelation v, 9 and 13. 

The history of God's kosmos is an oratorio 
of ever-increasing wonder. First we hear 
the anthem of creation; next, the permitted dis- 
cord of evil; then, the resolved harmony of re- 
demption. Nature, sin, and grace are vocal. 
The march of progress is rhythmic in its beat. 
Each life has its part. From echo-music of 
the spheres, and still small voice of mystery, to 
grand crescendo of full achievement; a unity in 
the piece has been, and is yet to be revealed that 
lifts the soul to awe and rapture. The inner 
theme is ever present, the leit motif bears out 
its promise, and the glory of the full chorus is 
prophesied throughout. 

When God laid the foundations of the earth, 
the morning stars sang together, and all the 
sons of God shouted for joy. That was in spite 
of all they foresaw. " And God saw everything 
that He had made, and, behold, it was very 

121 



122 GOSPEL FOR BOTH WORLDS 

good." With telescope, and microscope, and 
many an aid to comprehension, we are still look- 
ing to see more and more of what God sees in 
His creation ; and thus the wonder and the glory 
of it grow upon us from year to year. The 
whole earth is full of His glory. Day unto day 
uttereth speech, and night unto night sheweth 
knowledge. Their vibrant musical chord is gone 
out through all the earth, and their words to the 
end of the world. Every part of the million- 
fold song of nature has its meaning for him who 
has an ear to hear. The little stream running 
from the spring under the hill has a song for 
those who stop to hear; an endless, crooning 
roundelay, first a whisper and then a gurgle, 
something like this : — 

" Listen, listen ! 
God is love! 

I came up out of the deep Heart of love, 
Listen! listen! listen! 

God is love." 

So the sucking of the thirsty meadow drinking 
in the rain, the purling of the river, the roll of 
the surf, the roar of the waterfall, the whisper 
of the wind through the pines, the reverberation 
of thunder, even the shrieking of the gale moving 
in its vast, beneficent purpose, all sing of God's 
majesty and goodness. He is thus interpreting 
Himself to us in audible tones. 



THE COMPLETED CHORUS 123 

" No mere machine is Nature, 

Wound up and left to play; 
No wind-harp swept at random 
By airs that idly stray. 

A spirit sways the music, 

A hand is on the chords; 
O bow thy head and listen! 
That hand — it is the Lord's." 

It is not necessary for each member of an 
orchestra or chorus to fully comprehend all that 
the composer of the piece had in mind, or even 
all the leader grasps of the composer's thought. 
It is sufficient, in the main, that each expresses 
his own part as directed. So with the vast an- 
them of nature; the marvel of its unity is all 
the work of one Master-mind. Each detail of 
creation fits in with its wholeness in splendid, 
spontaneous harmony. At least we can say that 
the universe as a whole shows sufficient grandeur 
and finish to convince any candid mind that the 
details of it which seem to us to be imperfections 
are intended for some purpose yet to be under- 
stood. The mind which could plan one solar 
system is not likely to be accused of oversights. 
Some hesitating notes in the prelude are for a 
fine realistic purpose, to be better appreciated 
later on. Frankly, the anthem of creation — 
especially the creation of man — is one full of 
mystery. Its charm and genuineness are largely 
in the mystery. If we found no mystery; we 



124 GOSPEL FOR BOTH WORLDS 

might well doubt the infinitude of its composer. 
How God fashioned man from the materials of 
the earth and prepared his body for the in- 
breathed soul, Genesis does not tell, neither do 
we know. The straight evolutionary hypothesis 
is disproved by the reason of things; because to 
create a race by evolution would be unspeakably 
cruel and immoral. It is disproved by the facts 
of the case; because such an evolution of man 
from lower animal forms would have littered the 
earth with remains of brute men. Instead of one 
or two debatable skulls, we would have millions 
of specimens of these missing links. Nature 
has yet to afford an example of the gradual 
evolution of one species from another. The 
most advanced type of evolutionists teach an 
evolution by jumps, or sudden and accidental 
changes from one type to another. Presided 
over by Intelligence, this would be the most 
satisfactory kind of creation. This would also 
explain and provide for the acknowledged fact 
of the unity of our race. Out from the womb 
of animal nature a single pair, majestically 
distinct: the gateway from which they came for- 
ever closed: two perfect human bodies infused 
with innocent reasoning souls. Hearts of rever- 
ence looking out upon a world of wonder, and 
recognizing their Creator on every hand. The 
cap-stone of earth's creation put in place! If 
the morning stars sang together when earth's 
foundation was laid; think what ecstasy of jubi- 



THE COMPLETED CHORUS 125 

lation thus greeted its completed mission. Think 
how the sons of God must now have shouted 
again for joy. How the angels must have loved 
them: these two new, beautiful beings, made in- 
wardly in the image of God ! See them standing 
hand in hand, lifting their faces to the sky, un- 
marred by a blemish of imperfection, unstained 
by a thought of sin! You say it is a fanciful 
picture: why then do all the facts of accredited 
history point back to that picture? Take it, say, 
from the year 500 B. C. backwards. Instead of 
descending from comparative civilization back- 
wards toward cave dwellers and stone hatchet peo- 
ple ; as you go backward among the records and 
monuments of history ; you find increasingly finer 
types of men, more thoughtful literature, more 
wonderful feats of engineering, marvelous erec- 
tions of sheer physical strength, every evidence 
of finer physique, of longer lives, of brighter 
minds. Your cave dwellers, your stone age peo- 
ple are comparatively modern. The history of 
every race has been one of degeneration, without 
the life-giving power of God's truth. In Africa 
where a generation ago were found brutish canni- 
bal fetish-worshipers, we find the excavations of 
gold mines scientifically worked ages before. In 
America, we found stone-age savages roaming the 
woods among ruins and mounds erected by a far 
superior race. In Asia, huts of loose stones and 
mud cower against the remains of walls of mas- 
sive strength which have stood since before the 



126 GOSPEL FOR BOTH WORLDS 

dawn of written history. Take away the pyra- 
mids, the Sphinx, the ruins of Baalbec, the great 
wall of China, the cuneiform inscriptions of 
Babylon, the writings of Confucius and of Moses : 
then we will be more ready to listen to your late 
fancies about slow gradations upward from 
animal intelligence. This old Book says, God 
made man perfect. It says that He gave him 
dominion over all the works of His hand. The 
anthem of creation begins in joy. 

Then came the discord of evil. To say that 

it was not foreseen and permitted and woven into 

the plot, is to conceive of God as less than god. 

No musical creation is complete without its minor 

chord. But neither man nor angel ever was made 

to sin. The existence of evil in God's world has 

but one moral and rational explanation. It is 

that somewhere back amid the beginnings, one 

of God's sons, endowed with freedom of choice, 

freely chose to sin and thus became the tempter 

of others. Oh, what a crash of doom swept the 

chords of creation when the first of God's children 

turned to sin ! The wail of hate struck in where 

hitherto love and joy had been dominant. All 

too soon the tempter found his most facile prey 

in man. If this had not been so; that golden 

age of innocence to which the universal traditions 

of mankind point backward would have lasted 

long enough to leave its monuments of godlike 

power. Man fell, as angels had fallen, and the 

rough harsh notes came faster. Fear hushed the 



THE COMPLETED CHORUS 127 

response of man's heart to God, deceit struck its 
false chord, offered its cowardly excuse and ac- 
cusation, judgment pronounced its primal doom 
of exclusion and of toil. Soon murder shrieked 
its dissonance after the mutterings of envy, and 
remorse and fear groaned their drear lament over 
a bitter fate. How that discord of lust and 
rage and terror has sounded through the cen- 
turies, how it lingers still! But oh! thank God! 
just in the beginning of the discord of sin came 
the first new harmony of redemption. God's 
blessed promise of a new humanity triumphing 
over Satan with the God-man as the Captain of 
its salvation, Abel's sacrifice of atonement and of 
penitence strike the first notes of a new accord 
between God and man. This has been the ravish- 
ing melody of the ages. It has grown clearer 
and sweeter and stronger. It has thrilled in 
many million humble hearts. Far back in the 
patriarchal age, Job sang in the midst of his 
trouble, " I know that my Redeemer liveth, and 
that He will stand at the latter day upon the 
earth." The Psalms pulsate with the theme of 
rescue from sin and sorrow. Isaiah and all the 
prophets exult in the vision of a coming Saviour. 
" Many prophets and righteous men," Jesus said 
" have desired to see the things which ye see, and 
have not seen them." " Abraham rejoiced to see 
my day: and he saw it and was glad." During 
all these centuries of earth's waiting for her Re- 
deemer, heaven was thrilling with relief from its 



128 GOSPEL FOR BOTH WORLDS 

sadness over earth in the prospect of Christ's 
mission. When He came to be born as the Son 
of Man, heaven could no longer contain its joys; 
but sent a multitude of its host to sing the good 
news to listening ears of earth. Every true 
joy-song in the heart of man all these sad 
centuries has been an echo really of heaven's 
music of redemption. Professor Tyndall, wish- 
ing to demonstrate the wave theory of sound, 
had a wooden rod coming up through several 
stories of a building. The bottom rested upon 
the sounding board of a piano; upon the top 
in his lecture hall rested a violin. An unheard 
musician performed upon the piano below, and 
the violin gave forth the same strains faintly 
above. So there is a wireless telephony of 
heaven's joy in every heart on earth that thrills 
with the ecstasy of pardon. And wherever 
the glad tidings of great joy are proclaimed 
on earth, in sermon, song, or story, heaven, in 
its turn, echoes with its all-compensating evan- 
gel. 

There is nothing more pervasive than har- 
mony. Discords war with each other and stop 
bluntly. Harmonies catch from wire to wire, 
from heart to heart, and linger in diminishing 
waves. How the harmonies of redemption are 
triumphing amid all the short-lived blaring 
noises of this world ! There is prophecy in every 
note of perfect, universal melody by and by. 



THE COMPLETED CHORUS 129 

"My life flows on in endless song; 

Above earth's lamentation, 
I catch the sweet, though far-off hymn 

That hails a new creation. 
Through all the tumult and the strife 

I hear that music ringing; 
It finds an echo in my soul — 

How can I keep from singing ? " 

The theme of the book of Revelation is an 
echo from the future as well as a vision of it. 
The book is full of voices. John on Patmos 
hears the resolved harmonies of redemption 
swelling by several successive gradations to a 
completed chorus. First he hears the choral 
testimony of the four symbolic living creatures 
full of eyes and of the four and twenty elders 
singing the new song with their harps before 
the throne set in heaven. He, too, hears a voice 
from heaven as the voice of many waters, and as 
the voice of a great thunder, the voice of harpers 
harping with their harps. These also sing the 
new song before the throne and before the four 
living creatures and the elders, a song which no 
man can learn but the hundred and forty and 
four thousand sealed ones from the symbolic 
tribes of faith's greater Israel. Only those who 
have experienced sin and redemption can sing 
that song. Again he hears the voice of many 
angels round about the throne, the number of 
whom is ten thousand times ten thousand and 
thousands of thousands, saying with a loud 



130 GOSPEL FOR BOTH WORLDS 

voice, " Worthy is the Lamb that was slain to 
receive power, and riches, and wisdom, and 
strength, and honor, and glory, and blessing." 
Besides, John hears the song of them that had 
gotten the victory over the beast, as they stand on 
the sea of glass before the throne having the 
harps of God, singing the song of Moses, the 
servant of God, and the song of the Lamb, the 
song in honor of God's glorious triumph over 
all enemies. Along with his vision of the new 
heaven and the new earth, John hears a great 
solo voice out of heaven in recitative proclaim- 
ing that the tabernacle of God is with men and 
that He will wipe away all tears from their 
eyes. After the sealing of the hundred and 
forty and four thousand, John beholds and lo, 
a great multitude which no man can number of 
all nations, and kindreds, and people, and 
tongues are standing before the throne and 
before the Lamb clothed with white robes, 
and palms in their hands. These in turn cry 
with a loud voice, saying, " Salvation (be 
ascribed) to our God which sitteth upon the 
throne and unto the Lamb." And now, in our 
text, John gives us the echo of what we may un- 
erringly call the completed chorus. All the 
voices of the universe have come into it. Not one 
is silent, not one is discordant. Angelic spirits 
that have never known sin or sorrow are blend- 
ing their praises, trained through the ages, with 
the fresh outbursts of the latest redeemed. 



THE COMPLETED CHORUS 131 

Those the smoke of whose torment has been go- 
ing up to the ages of ages at last are in the 
chorus singing the deepest notes of rejoicing for 
deliverance. Hell's weeping and gnashing of 
teeth have turned to sobs of contrition leading up 
to paeans of praise. John hears every creature 
— above, around, beneath — coming into touch 
with the one great theme of rejoicing which 
thrills the universe with praise. He even con- 
ceives of the sea as containing intelligent beings 
capable of understanding and joining the song. 
So he dimly feels the existence of other beings 
than those which inhabit the surface of our own 
planet, inhabitants, perhaps, of other spheres 
who will have their testimony to give in song to 
the only Saviour. Oh, what a jubilee ! Oh, what 
a finale! Worth its ages of preparation ; worth 
everything it has cost humanity and God! Not 
too glorious to be the perfectly reasonable and 
inevitable consummation. Every stage of the 
piece and plot has held this as its manifest trend 
and destiny. All that has gone before would 
lose its meaning without this conclusion. Often 
we have been bewildered by the complexity of the 
plot; but does anyone suppose that God's great 
oratorio of the ages can possibly end in a minor 
key? 

Thank God! each of us here will be in that 
completed chorus. It is for each of us to choose 
this morning whether it shall be with heart-songs 
of mellowing peace dating from this moment. 



132 GOSPEL FOR BOTH WORLDS 

We too are among the number whom Christ has 
bought and redeemed with His own precious 
blood. The blood of Jesus Christ cleanseth from 
all sin — all my sin, all the world's sin. It avails 
for the sin of the universe. The whole world will 
yet accept the sacrifice which is great enough for 
the need of all, and which would fail of its full 
redeeming capacity and purpose, if all did not 
freely accept it. Sooner or later; then why not 
now? Come and join the choir. Along with 
those who by voice and life are singing God's 
praise among living men, sings the choir invisi- 
ble, whose music makes the gladness of the world. 
There is a place waiting for us in the choir invisi- 
ble. Let us make our lives shout for God! 
Some Hindoo converts were advised by their mis- 
sionary not to sing so loud in their meetings. 
They explained that in their former pagan wor- 
ship those who shouted loudest were considered 
most pious. " And shall we not sing with all 
our hearts for Christ," they asked, " when we 
used to shout so loud for Buddha? w 

So when we think of the mighty music festival 
we will be in in heaven by and by ; when with the 
Beloved disciple on Patmos we catch the back- 
ward echo of that completed chorus around God's 
throne at last singing with their faces toward the 
ages of eternity yet to come : " Blessing, and 
honor, and glory, and power be unto him that 
sitteth upon the throne, and unto the Lamb to 
the ages of the ages : " when we hear the last trem- 



THE COMPLETED CHORUS 133 

bling voice of penitence growing stronger in ex- 
ulting praise; we rejoice, even here in the 
beginning of the strife, with joy unspeakable and 
full of glory. Even here, by anticipation, we 
sing the new song of Christ's universal triumph 
surely coming at last : " Thou art worthy to 
take the book" (of the meaning of God's 
world) "and to open the seals thereof: for thou 
wast slain, and hast redeemed us to God by thy 
blood out of every kindred, and tongue, and 
people, and nation." Again, and again, and 
again we hear the shout, the refrain ringing out 
from heaven, echoing up from earth, sounding 
back from hell : " Worthy is the Lamb that was 
slain ! " When on Calvary's cross Christ cried, 
" It is finished ! " the keynote, then and there, was 
already struck for the Completed Chorus. 



BY THE SAME AUTHOR 

A MISSION TO HELL 

A STORY OF EVANGELISM BEYOND 



It is intensely interesting, and few will find any- 
thing to which good taste or sound theology will object; 
unless it be the implication that there may be repent- 
ance and salvation even for the doomed. — St. Louis 
Christian Advocate. 

The book in the guise of a story is a profoundly 
serious discussion of one of the gravest possible ques- 
tions. There is no flippancy. On the other hand the 
discussion is in a most deeply serious tone. It is thor- 
oughly animated by the spirit that brought Jesus down 
from heaven to earth on his mission of mercy. — Fall 
River News. 

It is undoubtedly the worthy product of a pro- 
found faith, a loving heart, and a keen intellect, well 
equipped in fact and fancy. — Universalist Leader. 

The whole book is more interesting than a ro- 
mance. — New York Homiletic Review. 

Delightfully original, quaintly humorous, impress- 
ively realistic, and intensely earnest. — Christian Life, 
London. 

The publishers' art has made this book attractive 
to the eye, the title is appealing to the imagination, and 
no one can doubt the sincerity of the author's purpose. 
His conceptions of the Savior's love and mercy are 
strong and beautiful. — Lutheran Observer. 

It is a story thrilling in narration and intensely in- 
teresting from cover to cover. No one will become 
drowsy in reading " A Mission to Hell." — Grand Rap- 
ids Herald. 

Cloth; 12 mo. ; 80 cents net; by mail, 91 cents 
SHERMAN, FRENCH & COMPANY, PUBLISHERS 



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